this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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And they keep assuming others are American too.
It's only polite to assume strangers matter until proven otherwise /s
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.
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.
It makes sense, but it hurts. Sometimes I talk about niche Asian stuff and get blasted by people assuming I'm American.
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.
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
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.
Fantastic name by the way
如果我開始用中文/廣東話咁你點算？
I would use the translator on my phone to understand 👍
The fun thing is that, the Internet lacks Cantonese support.
Strange, a lot of people speak that, why don't they have enough impact on the Internet to force that support?
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.
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.
The "Internet" and many foundations of networking originated in the US, but the Web, which is what I'd wager many think of when you say "the Internet", was invented in Switzerland by a British man.
I wager you'd be right, but most people are wrong.
I'm saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees's creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it's clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.
I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.
You seem to confuse people writing in English with being American.
I didn't know there were any others online outside our great nation ;)