Ok I hope I won’t come off as an ass here. I’m not always the most eloquent.
One thing that was quite grating on Reddit, was how most “global” subreddits were basically defaulting to the USA.
For example, people would ask questions in general question subs - “Can I legally…?” ”Is a teacher allowed to…?", “How much does it cost to…?” and unless they specify the country, you were just supposed to assume it’s the US, with people from other countries keeping such questions to specific subs.
And this is just a bit weird to non-Americans who always need to specify their jurisdiction or place when it’s relevant.
On Reddit it kinda made sense as Americans were almost half of all users, but with Lemmy, anyone can run an instance from wherever.
There is a bunch of instances dedicated to countries or regions.
But Lemmy.world has “world” right there in the title. So don’t assume everyone is from the same place as you.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love the global community! But I also don’t want to get confused and make assumptions.
So all I ask is some of these things:
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If you’re asking the global community a question, making a comment etc., that is specific to some area(s) of the world, always specify the place, even if it seems self-explanatory.
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Similarly, when using generic terms such as “congress”, “conservative”, “west coast” or “health insurance”, keep in mind that lots of countries have those too in some form or another. Specify what you’re talking about.
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Careful with names of places, especially abbreviation. By CA, do you mean Canada or California? Is IN India or Indiana? Is SD an SD card? UK is an university now? And so on. I personally think abbreviation should default to countries or global organizations, if anything - such as UK, EU, UN.
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When creating/managing a community, use the Display Name to specify what you mean. (I won’t call anyone out but I kinda want to…)
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If you see someone making these assumptions, maybe let them know it can be confusing for the others.
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Consider using (or creating) an instance or community that’s more region-specific or interest-specific . I don’t want to kick anyone out, don’t get me wrong, but everyone can subscribe everywhere, so…
I’ve seen instances for many countries (and the US midwest)… But not one for USA as a whole yet. So, just keep in mind the community is global.
Again, sorry if I come off harsh, it’s not my intent, and I don’t even mean to call out people from the US specifically. It’s just that on Reddit, this has often lead to some toxicity (r/USDefaultism and some other “defaultism” subs) and it would be a shame to bring that here as well.
And you know, just to try to avoid confusion.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I’m from the US, and I understand the frustration. But something to keep in mind is that reddit was built in the US, so the first users of the site were also from the US. Hence the original subreddits defaulting to the US.
At the same time, I propose that the fediverse doesn’t turn into an “America Bad” circle jerk like it turned in to on reddit.
Reddit was >75% US users for a long time. It just wouldn’t have been practical to specify the US on every post when it was almost always about the US anyways.
No, it’s a consequence of normies.
The original Reddit, like Slashdot, and Dig to a lesser extent, defaulted to a global community. These places started out by attracting nerds from across the globe. Nerdy communities are internationalist, and fluent in English. So there was a tacit understanding that English was simply Esperanto and that anyone could be from anywhere.
Slowly getting mainstream, Reddit started attracting randos. And American randos apparently associate English with themselves, completely lost to the fact that something like half of the planet uses it as a common language. So I sat and watched as the overall tone of the place went from a spaceship, to Chick-fil-A, Podunk.
Sauce: English as a second language and been there from the start.
I don’t think you understand. The heavy majority of users were from the US, if 95% of the posts are about the US, it’s safe to assume it’s the default. The website was built in the US.
It’s akin to going on a forum for Japanese news and being upset that everyone’s speaking Japanese and no ones specifying that they’re talking about Japan.
That’s besides the point anyway, people not from the US are frustrated that Reddit defaulted to the US, and I get it. I would be too if I wasn’t from the US.
I’m ALSO frustrated because the US can come up out of no where on reddit and everyone starts the US apart from seemingly no relation to the original post.
If you saw some of the comments on reddit that were shitting on the US about literally ANY other country, you would without a doubt be pissed off, especially if it was your own country. And it happens ad nauseum when it comes to the US.
I don’t think you understand. How do you know that the heavy majority of the users (of the early Reddit) were from the US? You are repeating the viewpoint that the place started out as US-centric — any concrete data here? Why do you think that the country where a web site was built in matters here?
I’ll reiterate: English is fundamentally different from Japanese because it is widely used as a second language.
I suspect you’ll find that just in general, any global social media is going to have a lot of people who don’t hold the US in very high esteem. It’s not a Reddit thing.
There are about 450 million people who speak English as their primary language. About 300 million of them are American.
If you’re communicating with a stranger in English and you don’t know they’re nationality, the odds are heavily in favor of them being American. Like it or not, we’re the default.
Except that billions of people can communicate in English, so your assumption is completely off. Not everyone speaks only one language or only uses their primary language on the global network.
Your assumption is completely off. My assumption is completely correct. I was talking about native speakers, as I clearly stated in my post. Your assumption that I meant to include everyone who can speak English is off.
I can speak Spanish. It is correct for someone in a Spanish speaking community to assume I’m from a Spanish speaking nation, because that’s the most likely scenario.
If you read English on the internet it’s more likely that it’s not written by a native speaker, since there are more people who write in English as a secondary language than there are native speakers.
It’s actually closer to 1.5 billion TOTAL speakers of English. Most English speaking people learned it as a second language.
Edit: billion not million
There are about 450 million people who speak English as their primary language. About 300 million of them are American.
Yeah, though you gotta remember that a lot of people do use English online even though it’s not their primary language. I’m American, but I frequent /r/europe on Reddit. For pretty much the majority of people there, English is a second language.
And English is kind of the global interchange language, and that’s likely to continue to get more-common, so it’s a phenomeon that will likely grow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
That’s ~1.45 billion people who can speak English as a first or second language. The US is the biggest single chunk of that, but it’s not the majority.
As long as we can avoid the following incredibly common and incredibly frustrating exchange:
Person 1: here is how a thing works
Person 2: you’re totally wrong, it doesn’t work like that at all
Person 1: yes it does, here’s an example
Person 2: no it doesn’t, here’s a personal anecdote
Person 1: I’m at a loss to explain your weird anecdote because that’s really not how it’s supposed to work at all
Person 2: that’s how it always works for me, you must be dumb
Person 1: look, here’s the proof from the people who invented the thing
Person 2: oh, well they don’t do it like that in my country.
Typically, person 1 is from a large country that, in the context of the broader discussion, it can reasonably be assumed they were referring to that country. Like in a thread about Tesla, talking about laws of the road, for example. It’s a totally reasonable assumption to make that the context is the US. Tesla is a US company, most Teslas are sold in the US, etc. Person 2 is from Italy or something. I can understand why person 1 would just assume they’re both talking about the US, though it would be better to clarify. I cannot fathom why person 2 would assume they’re both talking about Italy.
Or say, in a thread about the growth of Chinese megacities, there’s a sub-conversation about marketplaces. Person 1 is talking about China. Perfectly reasonable, that’s the context of the thread. Might be better to clarify but it’s still perfectly reasonable to assume the context is China. But person 2 is for some crazy reason assuming the context is South Africa, or can’t fathom that other places have different styles of marketplace vendors than South Africa.
The only thing I can imagine is that person 2 is like 13 years old and has no concept of life outside of wherever they grew up.
On the internet, Person 2 is more often than not the American. And they get upset when others assume a non-American perspective, even though non-Americans are expected to be considerate. That’s what this post is trying to discourage, Americans acting like their country is the default and there must be a “special context” to speak from a non-American perspective. The Tesla example isn’t even good because they’re sold worldwide.
It’d be really great to not have to translate from Fahrenheit and the imperial system too.
I always used to state both on Reddit. It’d be nice if people could think about doing that too…you know, given how many more people use Celsius/metric. No shade ❤️ it just gets annoying that it’s the default.
Have no idea how to do that conversion lmao. I know that 0 is freezing so can somewhat estimate but not really /:
For distance it’s a bit easier cause a meter stick is a yard stick and American football lol. Pus every teacher had one “in my day” (I’m only 33 lol)
I thought the same thing today lol
Some /m/worldnews thread and the topics was ‘Texas installs panic buttons for classrooms’…yeah nice 'world’news. I guess when your whole world is the US
Tb fair, not as an American, when is something world news? The news has to have an origin. Though panic buttons doesn’t sound new, so it probably wouldn’t be worldnews
I’d say something that may have an international or global effect. Like wars, alliances, global trends, plus stuff outside politics.
Single-country news can be significant too. The Canadian wildfires are world news to me because they have close to global effect and reflect the overall climate picture. Presidential elections anywhere are too, because they effect international relations and reveal wider trends.
While I agree with that definition of world news, I’m not sure the approach of siloing everything unless it hits a global threshold is the way to go, either. Personally, I appreciate seeing a smattering of events happening elsewhere, even if they’re not necessarily globally important. It’s an easy way to get exposure to things happening outside of my immediate bubble and I think it gives me a better global reference point generally. However, if “non-world news” were to be relegated to their respective local communities, I’m probably not going to attempt to go out and follow dozens of local communities just to see those stories; I will likely just miss out on those perspectives entirely and I doubt I’m the only one.
Lol “World News” never is and never will be until mods start deleting articles that are entirely American. One of the top posts from !worldnews@lemmy.ml is that an Evangelical Christian from America died…
