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0 pointsrussellbeattie5y ago0 comments

As an American who has lived abroad, I honestly will never understand this attitude. I sympathize, but honestly if I went into a .com.au forum and complained because the people there were talking about Australian politics, I'd be ridiculed mercilessly. And for good reason.

It's the same as if you complained that we're all writing in English, and you'd prefer that we didn't. Porque todos los articulos y comentarios estan en ingles?!? Debemos tener mas contenido en español! Es un comunidad global, no?! La gente aqui asuma que todos los lectores son anglos? Es un barbaridad!

Oh, wait. No it isn't. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You're insinuating there is and requesting the mods act accordingly. I disagree.

Seriously, I don't speak for the mods, but I don't recall it being stated anywhere that HN "serves the global community". In fact I just double checked the FAQ. It doesn't. HN has mostly been a site meant to cater to Silicon Valley tech startups for as long as I've been using it.

Let me know when ycombinator.com.au is up and running and we'll join you there and not talk about American laws. Until then...

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6 comments · 2 top-level

dang5y ago· 2 in thread

> HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans

That's not accurate. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to everybody. The only prerequisite is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Intellectual curiosity exists everywhere, HN's userbase is 50% outside the US, and at least 90% outside of Silicon Valley. That's important for people to understand.

ayewo5y ago

If you have a moment, it would be nice if you could add the high level demographics of HN's readership to a section of the website.

Meanwhile, I've tried to see if this bit of info can be added to the HN repo maintained by Max Wolf.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

dang5y ago

That's not a bad idea. All Max would need to do is add a link to one of the comments where I posted this data. But I should probably run the numbers again - it must be 3 years old by now, if not 4.

Tomte5y ago· 2 in thread

Nobody asks you not to talk about American laws. We outsiders love to do that. Many of us know American criminal law better than our own, just because of television shows and lack of experience with criminal law in our real lives.

And incidentally, the FAQ don't mention the United States, either.

But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.

I theorize it is because America is so big and powerful and there isn't a visible friendly society with different cultural views in the neighborhood that matters. Large societies that matter are far away, and rivals at best, enemies at worst.

There is a strong sense of "the American way is obviously the best, and everybody who disagrees or has been socialized on different norms is an idiot and must be destroyed".

Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.

It's a minority of posters, I'm sure, but they downvote and flag just about everything that isn't "America's way or the highway".

Nobody asks them to declare the Finnish, German or Japanese way to be better. But they simply cannot accept that other societies might be happy with other choices.

And those threads are really garbage.

ethbr05y ago

Your comment made me realize the television show I've been missing all of my life: "Law and Order: International"

In which our multi-national law enforcement and legal protagonists grapple with translating their own expectation into their crime's country's actual laws.

kodah5y ago

I can understand why that may be thought to be that way, and maybe some folks are just exactly that way.

> But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.

Many of us certainly can, however, America is often whalloped over the head for not being like other countries. In some threads this is made out peacefully, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766884

In others, America is widdled down to very reductionist arguments that Americans already debate endlessly. Things like, "This is a very uniquely American point of view" as if to eschew our problems like they don't still deserve debate because we should be just like everyone else. An example is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486350 Of course, this can be pretty frustrating because America isn't all the same, though I know it can be easy to perceive it that way. States in America are more like countries in the EU with respect to their homogeneity, or lack thereof. In some ways we have some overtones that are the same, but we're all different. As dang pointed out, HN represents a lot of people from outside Silicon Valley too.

You seem to allude to this here:

> Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.

and I agree. Maybe this is people learning they actually are part of a more global community and how to respect one another while also fostering thoughtful, curious debate. I can tell you that I often wake up in the morning to read my threads from the night prior because I want to know what the global community, outside of America, has had to say. As I'm doing right now in fact. That's to say, hearing your voice matters at least to me.

I'll try to pay attention to what gets downvoted, and if that's happening you'll get my upvote.

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