• 0 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Look at their comment history. They can’t go two days without getting in a dig at Americans. Even when it’s completely irrelevant and off topic. I’m just pointing out that this person has a bone to pick and not to take it personally.

    The funny part is that they’re often completely wrong when they try to talk shit. Like here, thinking that India having a larger population than the US is some kind of gotcha moment, despite less than 10% of that population speaking English.

    I’ll just transcribe a few lovely comments from our good friend Mr Blott.

    Glock pistols popular in US because of the proliferation of fucking cowards

    Scared of their own fucking shadows, those pussies

    What’s the difference between a cow and 9/11

    You’d stop milking a cow after 23 years

    Seems a bit unnecessary when you could just dress the ivy up like schoolkids and the yanks would wipe it out in a week

    German

    I’m guessing a yank whose great great great great great great grandfather once wiped his cock on a strudel

    They’re using American weapons, they should just aim for schools

    Holy fuck, yanks are weird

    God I’d hate to have such poor reading comprehension. You’d last about a minute in UK based communities lol

    You’re not out of the dark ages, you quivering shitebag lol

    You mean prison slavery? That’s the US, get on it lol

    Did it come out of the States?

    If so, guaranteed utter fucking horseshit

    You can punch your hand through your plasterboard mate lol

    You can always spot an American because they’re so fuckin scared of everything. Look, this one’s scared of his own shite 😂

    Of course!

    Just lose the -

    • Guns
    • Tiny-penis trucks
    • the “right” to hate-speech
    • the religious weirdo thing

    And you’ll be getting close to the 20th century!

    Know how yous get upset when people say “Americans are stupid”

    Literally a third of you have demonstrated that you’d eat gravel if someone said it’d cure immigrants

    A third. So lets just say only half of the other two thirds are stupid

    That’s quite a few. Almost a quarter pounder

    Yous cunts are greedy to the point of being fuckin EVIL

    That’s just… evil, taking money from poor folk and their kids

    How are yous letting evil cunts do this to your fellow citizens? How are you not fucking getting the flaming torches out?

    Selfish fucking cunts, the lot of you. Stand up for not just yourselves, for all of yous

    The bot is only “spreading misinformation” to people who are too stupid to realise that “left” and “right” mean politically different things in different countries

    Mostly the yanks

    I feel really sorry for this guy

    What kind of unhinged parents call their kid Tyreek?

    This is just from the past few weeks lmao. This dude has issues.


  • Ok, good.

    I’ll respond to this tomorrow. Gird your loins.

    The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

    As far as I’m aware, this only applies to /news and /politics. Those are the two communities out of thousands that have a default unlabeled US community and a separate community for world topics. /games isn’t specific to the US, /film isn’t specific to the US, and so on.

    So the claim that “anything without ‘world’ in its name is just about the US” is obviously incorrect, or that the very least a huge exaggeration. If you literally only use Lemmy for politics and news, that’s the only way it makes sense. And many people tend to do the opposite and try to avoid those communities.

    So the claim is wrong regardless, but even to the extent that it is valid, I would still defend the counterclaim.

    most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

    How do you define ‘a large enough proportion’? I would argue that 50% is large enough to justify such an assumption by a significant margin.

    There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics.

    I think it’s certainly possible to argue that the US is the default nation when it comes to news and politics, because our domestic events have by far the most global impact of any nation. Due to the $25T GDP and 11 aircraft carriers, what happens here has massive implications for other nations. If Trump gets elected, that has huge ramifications for European politics, Middle Eastern politics, you name it.

    However, I ultimately do agree that it would be more logical to have the communities be flagged US politics/news. Unfortunately humans are rarely logical creatures, and our behavior can often be better understood in social terms. And socially, this just kind of became the default because it was mostly Americans on reddit at first, and then there’s never been a compelling enough reason for it to change.



  • 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

    The assumption that the 51% of reddit constitutes a monolith of non-Americans is wildly reductive and offensive /s. The majority is irrelevant, Americans still constitute the plurality of users, and thus inevitably become the default.

    I absolutely agree that it’s a symptom of dysfunction, but I just think it’s unfair to blame on the average American. We didn’t ask for this either.





  • That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. I don’t mean to diminish your experience, but the world is simply too massive for anecdotal knowledge to apply when attempting to make sense of it. In other words, it’s impossible to gather a balanced understanding of global phenomena via primary experiences. I’m not as well traveled as you, but I’m analyzing the statistics rather than relying on personal experiences, which is much more informative when trying to recognize the big picture.

    I’m not reflexively lumping anything in, I’m simply recognizing the reality that the cultural life of anglosphere countries is heavily mixed, and that US culture dominates that mixture due to its size and economic position. It’s not a controversial statement to say that Canada and the US are peas in a pod.

    I left the original assumption unchallenged, but I don’t agree with it tbh. There are a ton of Europeans on Lemmy and also reddit, and it’s quite obvious to notice as an American. Furthermore, the entire premise is faulty. Rather than ask why people default to the US, the question is why people are assuming anything at all about anonymous accounts. And the answer is because of human nature, which isn’t something unique to Americans.


  • instantly popular globally

    There are 8 billion people on this planet, nothing happens instantly.

    Facebook took a long time to spread around the globe. Same for reddit, this is a quote from the Wikipedia article:

    As of August 2024, Reddit is the 9th most-visited website in the world. According to data provided by Similarweb, 51.75% of the website traffic comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.15% and Canada at 7.09%.[6]

    More than two thirds of reddit traffic still comes from Anglophone countries to this day, and that percentage was surely much higher back in the early days.

    I think you’re severely overestimating how many people from other countries actually use Western social media. Between the language barrier and the technology barrier, most people on this planet simply don’t have any opportunity or desire to use a site like Reddit or Lemmy. Facebook has slowly but steadily made global inroads, but by the time it got popular in non-western countries, Americans had largely moved on.