Allkpop.com is a news site dedicated to all things related to Korean pop music, or K-Pop, and I’ll admit that it is a guilty pleasure of mine to surf that website whenever I have a minute or two of down time. I call it a “guilty pleasure” because it can barely be considered a news source with the kind of unprofessional reporting that make up most articles. The writing oftentimes doesn’t even make sense and lacks professional standards or editing, and the bias is thick (think DailyMail). But it gets me my K-Pop news and does so quickly, and it covers interesting topics compared to other K-Pop news sources.

One feature Allkpop is rather known for are its lively comment sections, which tend to be filled with rabid fangirls and random Internet trolls, but which can occasionally hold some interesting discussion about controversies in K-Pop news.

An example of one of these comment sections can be found here. This is the comment section of an article about boy group BTS and their view toward a common explanation of their success, which has continuously grown since their debut in 2013, but recently exploded exponentially. Because BTS’s level of success is unprecedented in K-Pop, many have tried to pinpoint exactly what the key was to their international stardom.

The comment section of the article is full of readers debating the true reason for BTS’s success and whether their rise was due mostly to social media or whether it only played a small part. There are many debates that quickly devolved into petty personal attacks and name-calling, but here’s an example of a discussion with substance:

I think this particular exchange comes pretty close to deliberation. One commenter relayed his or her viewpoints, and another read them and took the time to come up with a response to the first person to enhance the other’s argument while sharing new thoughts, resulting in a civil discussion about BTS’s merits and success without either side seeking to “win” the conversation or bring the other side down.

Furthermore, it enhanced my own perspective on the subject by causing me to think about it from new viewpoints that they brought up. Both sides clearly showed a degree of respect for the other’s views while also bringing up points of contention. Their arguments were based mostly on personal experience and observation, however, so both sides’ arguments could have been enhanced with some solid evidence as support (in fact, Rose_Blue’s second comment says that girl groups are more popular than boy groups in Korea, which is blatantly incorrect based on overall sales in all aspects).

This exchange goes to show that even in a largely spiteful comment section such as the one under this Allkpop article, there are still pockets of interesting ideas and almost-deliberation from which readers can glean new understandings and a broadened view of the subject.