#34. 도배 -- Making sure that you get noticed (and hated, as a bonus)

If you wanted to get noticed in a large online community such as Reddit, what would you do?

I suppose if I were really desperate, I could try submitting the same post over and over again, just to make sure that it gets noticed.

Looks like there's an event going on where the owner of the website is choosing someone at random.

I suppose it works; but it's annoying, and most websites have some rules against repeat submissions. Korea is no exception; most communities have a rule forbidding its users from the act of "도배."

You might have noticed that many Korean houses have patterned walls, instead of simply painted walls. For whatever reasons, Koreans prefer to glue on patterned paper onto the wall. This paper is called "벽지" (where "벽" means "wall," and "지" is Chinese for "paper." You see this letter in "휴지 (toilet paper)," "폐지 (used paper)," "일간지 (daily papers)," etc.) And the act of gluing the 벽지 onto the wall is called "도배."

An example of the walls in a Korean house.

So, when someone keeps posting the same post over and over again, the person is covering the wall (as in the Facebook wall) with a patterned paper (in the form of repeated posts). In other words, he is committing the act of "도배." Other users might tell him,

도배하지 마세요 (don't cover up the wall).

In fact, many online communities have an explicit warning saying:

도배금지 (forbidden to cover up the wall).

Failure to follow this warning usually results in the webmasters blocking your ID (or even IP addresses in extreme cases!) from their websites, so don't do it!

This term is very specific to online activities, so it is naturally not used in real life.