its just the loudest voices that seem to drive the world.
Howdy y’all bros. My name is Todd Bonzalez and I am from one of the great American places foreigners know from your TV shows.
You mean anything with
outworld in its name?Sorry, anything with or without / everything not ich_iel
What? Like the World Series of Baseball?
The name fits, it’s just that the only people in the world who give a shit about baseball are from the USA.
Well that’s just not true, you should check out the World baseball Classic, it’ll open your eyes.
Japan would like a word, but otherwise, fair enough
Puerto Rico and Cuba also love baseball.
deleted by creator
The SMX “World Championship” just finished. It only takes place in the US.
Tbf it seemed to make more sense for the likes of Reddit, Facebook, etc. Similarly if I go to a Chinese forum I would not assume that everyone there was from the USA.
I’ve heard this more times, and it’s kind of baffling. The US isn’t even the biggest individual country on Facebook. What do people who assume everyone is from the US think a non-US “forum” looks like? Where do Americans think everybody else hangs out online?
Given how many people choose to speak their native language in the US (myself included), I guess they assume they post to forums that are in their language.
So like Facebook and Reddit? Social media isn’t in English specifically. People who speak other languages often post in their native language for some things and in the lingua franca for more international conversations. The Internet is the Internet regardless.
NOW, but when Reddit started, and therefore the now infamous subreddit names were first doled out?
I am fairly sure that the rest of the world already existed. And those formats keep being in use in newer places, too. This is not just a Reddit thing. Even you mentioned Facebook, which was instantly popular globally.
I am fairly sure that the rest of the world already existed.
No way - at least not back then! Source: am American, and therefore entirely confident that no other nations existed prior to my hearing about them (Christopher Columbus told me so! 😛). And maybe even then… which reminds me, are you so sure that you are real? Maybe you too are in America and just forgot? 🫠
Also, just so we are clear, “American” = “USAian”, definitely no other nations exist on the American continent, nope, no way! (Except Canada and Mexico, and they get a pass as wannabe USA states) 😜
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.
… I am a non-anglophone who, at the time of Facebook’s raise to social media dominance lived in multiple non-anglophone countries. I was there.
In one of the places I lived there was briefly a popular local Facebook alternative. It lasted maybe a couple of years before entirely capitulating and getting absorbed. That place does still have a local Reddit-like alternative, and Reddit is certainly more US-centric. You are right that Facebook stayed popular much longer outside the US. It has started falling off in some of those places, but I did keep a Facebook account for work purposes for a lot longer than you’d expect because work relations in those territories would share Facebook credentials as a way to establish professional contact. Twitter may as well have been a lost ancient civilization, though.
There’s also a lot to unpack in the assumption that on a thread about “why do Americans default to assuming everyone is from the US” you’re reflexively lumping the entire anglosphere as part of the US, but honestly, I’ll let the recently annexed English-speaking countries deal with that one on their own.
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.
Well, yeah, but it’s not anecdotal. There is data to tell you how big Facebook is and was outside the US, in what territories and by how much relative to their US popularity at what point. My personal experience just happens to match those numbers (India, by the way, is Facebook’s current biggest market).
I would also point out that by your own data, which is accurate as far as I can tell, 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.
Now, I agree with you that assuming things about anonymous accounts, and especially anonymous accounts writing in English, is foolish. Lots of people are fluent in English who are not native speakers and definitely who are not from the US. Most, in fact, depending on how you define your parameters.
I disagree that this is “human nature”, though. I don’t assume the same thing from people who speak my native language online. I also don’t assume the same thing about English speakers. The reason the OP is asking is that US ethnocentrism stands out. That’s not to say it’s not natural. We non-native dwellers in anglocentric social media will often comment on US cultural and political minutia, because US cultural and political minutia is present and relevant to us in a way ours isn’t to Americans (thanks for that, cultural imperialism). We pass for Americans in more situations than some American lurking in a German-language forum would, and we’re likely many times more numerous than… well, Americans lurking in German-language or Chinese-language socials.
But it being natural doesn’t mean it isn’t notable or an issue or a symptom of a dysfunction. Which it is, and it does annoy me for that reason.
As a US citizen I think we forget how much of our shit gets out.
I’m always surprised when I go abroad and people are up to date with somewhat niche US info. I was in Hong Kong and some local dude made a reference to the fatass NJ gov who was chilling on the closed beach during lockdowns.
I do feel like I see far more people complaining about US people making assumptions than I do US people assuming. When I’m replying to someone I don’t put any thought into where they’re from unless they drop a context clue.
Note: this is just for your understanding, I’m not criticising you.
It’s the little things, like using NJ as a short form assuming everyone to know. Hong Kong is arguably more well known globally, but you spelled it out.
The ones in the know often don’t see the assumption.
This is true. I wonder how often people assume and don’t think anything of it because it doesn’t even register that they may not be correct.
That said, I once did have a long conversation here with someone who just straight-up refused to believe I’m not American and would not take my word for it. I never quite got why he believed I’d be lying about that, but that person would not be persuaded, and it was one of the most baffling interactions I’ve had in my life.
…Anything written in English, and you can usually filter that even more by just looking for people using too many U’s.
I think you’ll find most of the time the British use precisely the number U’s they intend to though typos may afflict even the best.
What if i use “color”, " gouvernment", “dialogue”, " humor", “armor”, " and “honour”
Im gonna assume youre from the coast of Virginia and are transcribing your accent.
I’d think ‘who’s this foucker?’
Finally your edumacashun is compleute, go fourth and enjouy your freedumb! 😜
I see you like to keep 'em guessing.
Self leart second language, so it could be anything.
And when you do use those ⟨U⟩ (I do), people assume that you know what’s going on in the UK (I don’t.).
people using too many U’s
You mean people using British spellings right?
Why whateveur dou you mean?
Lol ngl that’s probably how a French accent would look like spelt out XD
Agreed, reading this summoned the SpongeBob narrator in my mind.
I read this like officer crabtree from Allo Allo
One day if we are brave, we will get rid of the U in a lot of British words like color and armor, but by God we will keep the British U in the word glamour!
Jimmy Eat USA
Bleed Earthlings
Aren’t the majority of English speakers from the US?
English (excl. creole languages) l1 380 million l2 1.135 billion total 1.515 billion
Nah its 50/50, either you’re a USA English speaker or you’re not
I speak American, boy.
(Kratos voice)
I’d just like to mention that plenty of ESL users speak English more than their native, and that the country with the most people who use English for interacting with the Internet, it’s probably India. Indians communicate to a lot of their compatriots in English, since they are also an ex-British colony, and have a large variety of native languages.
No, it’s roughly 20% (297M/1537M). Source.
What’s your definition of first/second language if you grow up bilingual?
The majority of English speakers aren’t from the US, though the US does have the most English speakers. Important distinction to make!
That sounds like America’s problem. Big portion of western eu, especially non-boomer and non-french, comprehend English
verywell, so I dunno why you’d just dismiss it in a post about us-defaultism when almost everything is text basedThat was the joke.
I’ve heard it called “US Defaultism” where most Americans online seem to assume that everyone they interact with is from their country and all US news is considered significant even when it really isn’t.
Counterpoint: I rarely see non-US news posted. I do from time to time here on Lemmy, but it’s very rare.
I might just be in the wrong communities though.
That’s because most of the world countries keep internal news, internal, but you’re right tho, not enough representation makes people think like that
I do lean moee towards us defaultism being the case as other country news does get posted but has zero to none interaction because the us posts threads are getting so much more activity.
Outside Lemmy I use Apple News and what I kind of hate about it is even while traveling abroad you’re stuck with US news. I have both English and Spanish languages set up on iOS so being in a Spanish-speaking country, it would be nice to see local news in either language.
Wish we had Apple News :(
I generally avoid news of late of any kind as its just so bloated and every once a week or so just visit one of my local sites for a quick scroll.
The community [email protected] used to have it in their rules, that it must be US news, same as on the old site. I just looked, and it’s no longer a rule on lemmy.world
I didn’t realize that — kind of dumb it was US-only when the instance TLD is
.world. 🤦♂️
I do this sometimes, and I hate when I catch myself doing it.
Imagine if different fonts represented different accents.
𝓗𝓸𝔀 𝓭𝓸 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓭𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸?
I’ve been guilty of that- commenting before checking what community the post was in. Thankfully, I’ve found that most people outside of the US prefer gentle correction. Unfortunately, I doubt the average person from the US would show the same courtesy if the roles were reversed.
I find that it correlates more with education status than nationality… but therefore it surely is more rare among the set of average Americans who have access to the internet than globally.
… the average Westerner also has access to the internet? At most, maybe it excludes those who don’t speak English
as a person that came from 3rd world country, i relate T_T
If I was using a website called “Facebloke” that was well known to have been made and ran in the UK, I’d assume everyone on it was British.
Ah, yes! The 3 billion Americans on Facebook!
And why would you make that assumption? The internet has no borders, so it doesn’t really matter where or by whom something is made. Especially if the language is English, which has somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion speakers worldwide.
“Facebloke”
Yes, I saw that. But it is obviously meant to be an analogy for how Facebook is a website famously made in America by an American.
The internet has no borders
Except that it actually does. See: China, North Korea, other fucked up governments that lock down the Internet for their people etc.
I’m ready to discuss maple syrup on HoserLoonieSorryEh
Or the Australian version “Matebook”, full with Aussies.
Mate.
We call it Cuntface down here.
To be fair, we call everyone Cuntface down here.
This is why:
The US has more allocated IPv4 addresses and more users per allocated IPv4 address than any other country, by wide margins - and IPv6 adoption is not that widespread yet. It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
2016 is a little far, isn’t it?
I would love to see a more recent source if you have one.
Regardless, possession of IP addresses doesn’t change all that much. In the early days a company could buy an entire Class A (1.X.X.X) address space comprising 16million+ addresses for their private use. There are still many companies holding large blocks of addresses, and most of those companies are in the US, and they don’t just give up those addresses.
The point being, there’s significant resistance to redistributing addresses once they’ve been allocated. They don’t change hands terribly often (and keep in mind we’re talking about actual internet addresses, not local network addresses that are being dynamically assigned and NATed across router domains).
Nope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
Strangely enough English is spoken in countries other than the US and even more use it as a lingua franca.
It is interesting you think IPv6 is not widespreaad https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
Of course English is spoken in other countries, and other countries have high numbers of internet users, but it does not follow that English is a commonly used language for internet users in other countries. Most Chinese are probably speaking Chinese, most Indians are probably speaking Hindi.
The IPv6 graph you linked shows that adoption is still less than 50%, and I’m not clear on their methodology… does “users that access Google” mean users with Google accounts? or individual users that use google.com? or does it include all of their cloud services? do web servers linking content from Google Ads count? does this data represent mostly end users, or also infrastructure connections?
When non-native English speakers are navigating in a non-national internet setting we use English. I have gathered from the many American comments in this thread, that that fact is apparently incredibly difficult for Americans to gauge. Nevertheless, it is a fact.
That would be 3 addresses per US citizen. You have some whales like MS in there, just because your companies can grow dangerously big.
No, they highlight some problems with IP4: Bad distribution of IP4 ranges and bad usage of those ranges. So the graphs show the US has way too much IP actresses, some under used/unused and some overused. The blog post they are from is pretty clear about this.
These graphs do not give an indication of how many users per country there are. There are in fact statistics on that which expectedly show China and India on top. These however do not take into account that social media use way more popular in the U.S. for now.
The closest stat may be Reddit users by country which seems to indicate that about every 2nd user is from the US. (Not sure if Russian/Chinese bot accounts also count towards these though).
These graphs do not give an indication of how many users per country there are. There are in fact statistics on that which expectedly show China and India on top.
Well sure, but people from those countries are far less likely to be speaking English, which is why I said:
It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
The prevalence of internet use in countries with primary languages other than English has no bearing on this statement.
The point of using the IP address statistics is to show that the vast majority of websites on the Internet were created in the US for the US market, and that is still true today.
On a side note, the distribution of addresses is unbalanced but it isn’t “bad”. It is a consequence of a system growing over time. Communications infrastructure cannot pop into existence everywhere all at once, and realistically not many people outside the US had any interest in the internet in 1983.
Sorry, are you trying to prove beyond a doubt that you are dishonest and statistics-illiterate?
which is why I said:
It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
No, you wrote:
**The US has more allocated IPv4 addresses and more users per allocated IPv4 address than any other country, by wide margins **- and IPv6 adoption is not that widespread yet. It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
So your assumption is based on a gross misinterpretation of the statistics you presented. Your incorrect interpretation of the graphs would put US participation at about 99,99%, which is obviously ridiculous.
Also according to Wikipedia the percentage of English speakers located in the US is lower that 20%. Does this mean that only 1 in 5 users is from the US?
The point of using the IP address statistics is to show that the vast majority of websites on the Internet were created in the US for the US market, and that is still true today.
That’s not at all what these graphs show though. While I agree that most websites might be US targeted towards the US calling that ‘vast’ is bit of a stretch.
… and realistically not many people outside the US had any interest in the internet in 1983.
I gather you’ve not been around then. Almost none had any interest in “the internet” until the mid 90s - this includes the US. Partly because what you refer to as “the internet” was called WWW back then and started only 1989. People had been very anal about this until about 2005 - I guess you haven’t been around then either.
There are tons of tankie subs where you can masturbate to false expectations of the planet and openly hate people who you’ve never met before, check it out!
ironically, tankies usually fall very deep into US defaultism, since everything everywhere is always the fault of the US
Oh yes I forgot I blocked Lemmy.ml, no russian representation
This meme is essentially Al-Qaeda’s motive for doing 9/11.
I wonder if a news community with a “no mentioning the US” rule would work. Not out of any hate, just as something arbitrary like “don’t use the letter E”.
There was one on Reddit that had a rule that no more than 50% of a story could be about the US and if the US was one of two parties they preferred the other point of view.
