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It's nice to see a Korean talking about what foreign nationals here have been saying for years. @juwonreports/1571724194756587521Permalink On twitter.com
Mood +3 🙂
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(And Juwon is spot-on about the Galagosization of most apps in Korea. Anytime someone talks about Korea being a "hub of _____ in Asia" I just think about how, yeah, no, visitors can't do ANYTHING on a global app, and the local apps are not a reasonable option for most of them.)Permalink On twitter.com
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Of course, as Juwon says, if you live here you should maybe get used to using local apps, even if they suck. (I use Naver Maps, but find it absurd how entering a complete address gets me nothing, while entering the right chunk of the address works, for example.)On twitter.com
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(For comparison, Google Maps doesn't choke on full addresses. I just input the entire address from my family's old house back home and bing, the location popped up just as easily as if I'd only given the relevant bit of the address.)Permalink On twitter.com
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But more crucially, non-Koreans who live here have plenty of other digital divide stuff to deal with. Like how many websites don't work with ARC numbers (when they easily could). Or how often sites are designed only to work in one browser (or one browser on one OS only).Permalink On twitter.com
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Dealing with an ARC, you're literally having to guess how many letters of your name are in the system. SELLARGORDONA? SELLARGORDONALE? The whole thing? Spaces? No spaces? It's never the same between sites. Keep guessing, foreigner! It's frustrating to no end.Permalink On twitter.com
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If they would, for example, let us just have a Hangeul spelling for our names, it would fix it. But no, your ID must match your name as it is in your passport. But our system is built only to accommodate short names. Got a long name by Korean standards? Too bad for you.Permalink On twitter.com
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You're also constantly having to guess which browser/OS this or that site's designer decided would be the one browser that the site works in, because they don't even bother to detect other browsers and show a popup warning about it. Like, is that too much like hard work? Really?Permalink On twitter.com
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The other day I was trying to submit a notice of address change to the government via the hikorea website. Had to call to find out that it only works with Windows. (No popup, nothing.) The clerk admitted that this is a "big problem" but it's not getting fixed.Permalink On twitter.com
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I thought she was joking at first: wasn't era of Windows-only over? Nope. I visited the site and noticed that it displays really badly (broken all over) in Internet Explorer, but displays okay in Chrome. But the "application system" only works in IE. (?!?!?)Permalink On twitter.com
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To be fair, lots of Korean webpages work even badly for Koreans using them. Trust me, I've heard the complaints, especially about gov't webpages. (I hear it from the next room at least once a week.) But I'd still prefer "works badly" over "doesn't work at all for *you* people."Permalink On twitter.com
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I suspect it'd be very easy to make this stuff work for everyone, if anyone actually cared enough to spend the a few minutes fixing these "problems." Nobody bothers, because nobody cares... or maybe some see this as how it should be, I don't know. It's aggggggggravating.Permalink On twitter.com