Supplementary article for my Dreamcatcher album reviews
I haven’t used V-Live in a while now, so I’m not familiar with the current ranking system. We used to have levels based on points called “Chemi-Beat”
as well as a leaderboard displayed prominently on the front page, displaying those with the highest scores. The system back then (around 2017) was quite opaque, and nobody really knew how it worked other than the limited information they provided:
- You can raise your Chemibeat even more by watching a live broadcast.
- The level and ranking are calculated based on your activities and the weight is given on recent activities; it is important not to stop doing activities to get higher level and ranking.
Comment sections for videos would be flooded with people spamming emojis desperately trying to increase their score. The more people did it, the more would join in, leading to comments for less active older videos being uselessly-filled with spam. It’s a shame they never realised the account in first place rarely ever posted any comments and hated spamming.
Long story short, I figured out how the system worked enough to exploit it. I had my account sitting first place on the leaderboard for about three months before I felt bad and decided to log out so someone else could take my spot. I still wonder from time to time if Siyeon ever noticed she was being used as the profile picture for that account, but it’s over now. Back then, they had about 30K to 60K followers.
I thought I would lose my position by the next day, but it turns out I racked up so many points it actually took several weeks for me to drop to second place. I find it amusing how far ahead I was, given that I didn’t spam their videos with meaningless emojis and figured out what actually contributed the most: views.
Even if what I did wasn’t technically legit by the end of it due to reasons I’ll demonstrate below, I feel my passive approach was still better than vandalising every video’s comments on a daily basis. I attribute my success to both luck and questioning everything, especially wondering whether what everyone else was doing was the really correct.
The method
After a period of experimentation and figuring out that views (and watch time) contributed the most to points, I created an array of bookmarks, separated into folders of 20 videos each, and saved every single one of their videos into these folders. From then, it was simply about clicking “Open all” on each folder, spamming shift + tab to load them, closing the tabs, and repeating until there were no folders left.
The reason I separated them was due to performance issues. As it turns out, having over 100 videos running at the same time can make your browser crash quite spectacularly.
I would do this at least once every day, but over time it started getting way too tedious so I looked into alternative methods. What I was doing was very simple, so I looked into getting a program to do it for me and found AutoHotKey. I had prior no experience in programming, but the program was simple enough for me to complete in a few days as I just used simple mouse position and clicks for most of the actions.
The End of Adventure
In the end, because I ended up using a script to check all 150+ tabs for me on a daily basis, I don’t think it was entirely legitimate even if it started off that way. I also had no idea how far behind the account in second place was, which gave me a lot of stress thinking I was in danger of losing my position every day, so I decided to throw in the towel. Being first may have been a fun idea at first, but I wasn’t enjoying it anymore; I would feel nervous every time I opened the app wondering if I had lost my ranking, and I would lose sleep at night because of it.
I felt extremely relieved when I finally lost my position, but I was still glad that I managed to achieve it at least once for the artist I liked so much.
That’s the end of the story. It’s not a big deal, but I thought it was something fun to share.