5 of 2,089 posts survived a second day on Korea's forum front pages. In the English K-culture rooms, 190 of 523 did

We take one photograph a day of where Korean internet attention is sitting: the front pages of Korean community sites, and the front pages of the English-language subreddits about Korea. We keep the files because a day’s front page cannot be recovered later.

Eight consecutive days of those photographs answer a question we had not thought to ask: how long does a post stay up?

A Korean forum front page is completely new every day

Five posts out of 2,089. Two of the three Korean sites we captured every day turned over their entire visible front page between one evening and the next, eight nights running.

The English-language rooms about Korea do not do that

Thirty-six percent against 0.2 percent. As a ratio that is about a hundred and fifty to one, and it holds at every one of the four English rooms — even r/kpop, the least sticky of them, is 56 times stickier than Inven, the most sticky of the three Korean forums.

Note the order inside the English column, because it is not the order of size. The busiest room, r/kpop, is the one that behaves most like a Korean forum: 323 posts across eight days and only one in six surviving. The quietest, r/koreanvariety, kept four posts in five. Volume and stickiness run in opposite directions, which is worth holding onto if you publish into these rooms.

What this does not measure, and it matters here

We look once a day. A post that went up at 9am and was gone by 8pm never enters our record, so we cannot say a Korean forum post lives one day — only that after one day, 99.8 percent of them are no longer on the page we photograph. The real figure is probably hours. “One day” is the resolution of the instrument, not a finding about posts.

The second limit is bigger. Inven and Ruliweb build a rotating “best” list; Reddit builds a “hot” ranking that weights votes against age. Those are different machines, and some unknown part of the gap above is the machine rather than the audience. We cannot separate them with titles and URLs, so we are not going to attribute the difference to Korean readers being faster.

What survives both caveats is the operational fact, and it is the reason we counted: a thing you put in front of a Korean forum audience is gone from view within a day, and a thing you put in front of an English-language Korea audience is still visible for two or three. Those are different publishing problems, and most people writing about Korean culture in English are working with an intuition borrowed from the Korean side.

The middle case, kept separate

The same daily capture includes Google News feeds, and they land between the two:

That is what a news feed should look like — it is ranked by recency and relevance and not by a room full of people voting — and it is reported here separately rather than averaged in, because mixing a feed with a forum would produce a number that describes neither.

Which of the names on those pages the English-speaking world actually looks up is a different question, and we count it at who gets read when Korea gets written about.

The same daily capture also feeds our count of how Korean desks put an age in the headline. That piece reads what the pages say; this one reads how long they say it for.