Comment on The US population only accounts for 4.2% of the world.
NorthWestWind@lemmy.world 4 months ago
And they keep assuming others are American too.
Genuine Skill Issue, how long has the internet been around?
Americans don’t assume people online are americans because they’re arrogant assholes, they assume because it’s been X decades and somehow their 4.2% of the world still dominates the internet.
They *think they dominate the internet because they only speak one language
The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it’s makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there’s some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.
Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it’s the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn’t overtly obvious, or even intentional.
Many networking foundations originated in the US, but what we’d think of as “the Internet” today was invented in Switzerland by a British man.
Yeah, maybe!
But we’re still doing this thread in English, and I’ll bet the reason why isn’t Britain’s impact on the internet.
But we’re still doing this thread in English, and I’ll bet the reason why isn’t Britain’s impact on the internet.
It is incredible how poor you guys are at understanding the concept of languages. Your comments are completely unrelated to the fact that Americans are not a majority on the internet, even though Americans always assume so.
You seem to confuse people writing in English with being American.
It’s only polite to assume strangers matter until proven otherwise /s
I didn’t know there were any others online outside our great nation ;)
MNByChoice@midwest.social 4 months ago
It made sense on Reddit, being an American company. I am sure British or Australian social media has a similar assumption. (Please list them below.)
It makes less sense here.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It was kinda funny when lemmy was just taking in the reddit exodus crowd and people were complaining that their front page was full of German and Polish posts.
NorthWestWind@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It makes sense, but it hurts. Sometimes I talk about niche Asian stuff and get blasted by people assuming I’m American.
uienia@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It doesn’t make any sense at all. The world wide web is gasp world wide. Reddit is an international platform which deliberately appeals to an international audience, regardless of which country the company is situated in.