It was just another cold November day on campus, and I was sitting in a lecture, trying to stay awake. This was back in 2019, when I didn't realize yet that I would miss the live lectures — but that's not the point. Out of boredom, I decided to go and check the Google Form I had created a couple of weeks before. I looked at it and I couldn’t believe my eyes — there were too many responses. I stopped caring about the lecture, and did something else — I copied and pasted the submissions, and added the hashtag #HaK with an identifying number. On that November day, I had to repeat this action almost 100 times.

The idea to create Here at KAIST (HaK) was pretty spontaneous. While procrastinating on assignments one day, a couple of friends and I struck up a conversation about KAIST Confessions, the predecessor to our page. Created in the Spring 2018 semester, the content of that page was controversial. There were dozens of offensive posts for every hilarious one, and after only a month, Facebook banned the page. Missing KAIST Confessions and its chaotic atmosphere, where a genuine advice-seeking question would be next to a post discussing masturbation habits, we set out to recreate the page but agreed that it was necessary to set up rules and moderation that would not let offensive posts through. Becoming admins, we checked the content of every form submission before posting. When creating the page, we came close to using the confessional name in homage to the previous page, but considering what had happened to it, we decided it was better to avoid the association. Eventually, someone suggested the “Hear at KAIST” pun. We gave up on the pun but kept the idea, and with a simple logo we launched the page.

At first, the promotion of the page was slow. Trying to create some interest, I wrote a few posts myself. I still remember how I cringed writing a couple of posts that were made to provoke a “what the hell?” reaction. It worked, though; once people started subscribing to the page and the posts flooded in, I didn’t have to do that anymore. But we still did everything else manually. We copied the post from Google Forms, pasted it to Facebook, and tagged it with the right hashtag.

The content of the first Here at KAIST posts differed from the posts now. There were a lot of crush posts asking if this or that person was single. Although there aren’t many now because of remote learning, back then there were so many that we at one point considered creating a separate page just for that purpose. Someone got ahead of us and actually made one called KAIST Compliments, but then they abandoned that page, and the ensuing pandemic removed the demand for such posts altogether. I hope that with the return of students to campus someday they will make a comeback, not least because the crush posts led to the first memes on the page, like the Excel spreadsheet ranking hottest guys at KAIST and the posts praising some Kazakh guy’s butt.

Not everything went smoothly. Because the rules of the page are quite subjective, we often argued over whether to skip particular posts, and we didn’t always make the right decision. One day someone sent a humorous post about the red-light district in Daejeon, and we published it. But then someone shared the post at KaDaeJeon, complaining that the post violated Korean law. We had to apologize. A few other screw-ups happened because of cultural misunderstandings. Not knowing the context, one admin overlooked a troll post asking for a recipe for Armenian dolma, and we later had to apologize to the Azerbaijani community at KAIST. A church once promoted itself through us by sending in a post announcing an event for international students; after that, we got another anonymous post explaining that this church was a notorious cult that lured foreigners in. It didn’t take long before representatives of the church messaged us, threatening to sue us under Korean defamation laws. Not wanting to have anything to do with it, we deleted both posts. Sometimes we failed, too. Once we ran a contest for a new logo for the page without offering any rewards to the winners. The only submission we got was a dick pic.

Toward the end of Fall 2019, we realized we had to optimize the page, since there were so many posts every day. Through word of mouth, we came across a guy who developed an automated posting system for us. It was far from perfect, sometimes crashing and preventing us from posting for days, but it still made our job much easier. Publication decisions were made through a voting system: as soon as a submission got a majority of admins’ votes, it was published right away. Being a page administrator after that didn’t take as much time as it seems, but I was often distracted from my studies. Then because of the pandemic, posts didn’t come in as much as they used to, but moderating still felt like a job when some important news happened. 

I don’t want to judge the KAIST community by the posts that come to our attention, but the many unpublished posts were prime examples that you can study well and be dumb at the same time. There were racist and sexist submissions, outright insults to individuals, and creepy stalking posts. During the Black Lives Matter protest, someone was furiously spamming our inbox with Ben Shapiro videos that somehow were meant to destroy liberals. But not all the facepalm-inducing content was related to politics — there was an uninteresting dispute that dragged on for a dozen posts whether 2020 was the beginning of the decade. We published these posts because they didn't violate page rules, but as one commenter sarcastically pointed out, these guys must be fun at parties.

I remember someone asking if the HaK admins were dying from an overdose of cringe. We weren’t dying, but moderating such content was not the most pleasant job. Not that it surprised me — it was all too expected to get questionable content at a university where many people still can’t keep up a conversation. And I don’t regret being involved in creating HaK. Now that I am not an admin anymore, I have to admit that the page has its perks — for example, students who didn’t have seniors in their community can ask questions about classes. People can share their opinions on courses, and give advice on what to take and what to avoid. Someone can freely rant about a problem they had and even get words of encouragement from other students. Even if such posts sometimes drown in the pile of other submissions, creating Here at KAIST was still worth it. After all, the lack of such a page for many years among KAIST's international students was a bigger embarrassment than having one now.