Yeah that's what I meant, very true. But the setting is much easier to optimize.

Rule 1 of tripping. The setting dictates everything.

I think you owe me an apology. It took me a while to copy paste all that senseless vitriol and you won't even acknowledge your mistake. Disappointing.

It's a timeless classic

WWII would be over soon-ish even without you, you joined last minute when it started affecting you directly.

1941? That was the last minute of WWII? Are you high? Are you familiar with the continents of Asia, Africa, and/or Oceania? Or does your knowledge of geography and history end at the borders of the noble European continent?

The Soviet Union didn't even join the Allies until June of 1941. And they did a hell of a lot more to win the war than any of the western European Allies, that's for damn sure.

Not to mention the vast economic and logistical aid given prior to entering the war. Not to mention the Marshall Plan. Not to mention the Berlin Airlift. It's not a misguided belief, the US has verifiably used its economic and military power to protect the interests of western European allies throughout the past century.

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.

As I've already explained, you're talking about the general case of assuming where someone is from. Because otherwise, you're suggesting that we should assume someone is from a different country than the US? Which country? I honestly don't understand what your point is.

they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

Yes, this is the most important trait among humans, it is known.

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.

Danke schon 🙃

Don't ever talk about kilometres in here. Are you trying to spark an international incident?

FWIW ich habe Deustch gelernt. Aber ich habe die meistens vergessen 😔

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.