It’s a timeless classic

Look at their comment history. They can’t go two days without getting in a dig at Americans. Even when it’s completely irrelevant and off topic. I’m just pointing out that this person has a bone to pick and not to take it personally.

The funny part is that they’re often completely wrong when they try to talk shit. Like here, thinking that India having a larger population than the US is some kind of gotcha moment, despite less than 10% of that population speaking English.

I’ll just transcribe a few lovely comments from our good friend Mr Blott.

Glock pistols popular in US because of the proliferation of fucking cowards

Scared of their own fucking shadows, those pussies

What’s the difference between a cow and 9/11

You’d stop milking a cow after 23 years

Seems a bit unnecessary when you could just dress the ivy up like schoolkids and the yanks would wipe it out in a week

German

I’m guessing a yank whose great great great great great great grandfather once wiped his cock on a strudel

They’re using American weapons, they should just aim for schools

Holy fuck, yanks are weird

God I’d hate to have such poor reading comprehension. You’d last about a minute in UK based communities lol

You’re not out of the dark ages, you quivering shitebag lol

You mean prison slavery? That’s the US, get on it lol

Did it come out of the States?

If so, guaranteed utter fucking horseshit

You can punch your hand through your plasterboard mate lol

You can always spot an American because they’re so fuckin scared of everything. Look, this one’s scared of his own shite 😂

Of course!

Just lose the -

• Guns

• Tiny-penis trucks

• the “right” to hate-speech

• the religious weirdo thing

And you’ll be getting close to the 20th century!

Know how yous get upset when people say “Americans are stupid”

Literally a third of you have demonstrated that you’d eat gravel if someone said it’d cure immigrants

A third. So lets just say only half of the other two thirds are stupid

That’s quite a few. Almost a quarter pounder

Yous cunts are greedy to the point of being fuckin EVIL

That’s just… evil, taking money from poor folk and their kids

How are yous letting evil cunts do this to your fellow citizens? How are you not fucking getting the flaming torches out?

Selfish fucking cunts, the lot of you. Stand up for not just yourselves, for all of yous

The bot is only “spreading misinformation” to people who are too stupid to realise that “left” and “right” mean politically different things in different countries

Mostly the yanks

I feel really sorry for this guy

What kind of unhinged parents call their kid Tyreek?

This is just from the past few weeks lmao. This dude has issues.

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 🙃

Mr Blott really really really likes to denigrate Americans. Don’t rain on his parade

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.

Damn I gotta watch this ASAP

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.

You don’t need those commas in that sentence. It makes you sound like Christopher Walken 😅

Rage against him when he does evil things, by all means. But when you start raging against him 24/7 for no particular reason, it serves no purpose. In fact, it lessens your ability to actually call him out when he does bad stuff, because you sound like the boy who cried wolf.

And more importantly, it also affects the quality of discussion on Lemmy. One major advantage we have over reddit is that people tend to actually read the articles and make insightful comments that add to the discussion. “Hurr Durr Muskrat bad” is the opposite of that, it’s a reddit style pandering comment that ultimately has no substance or meaning. When these circlejerky comments become more common than good comments, the value of this site as a forum for legitimate discussion falls off a cliff.

It’s baffling how people on Lemmy hate Musk so much and yet can’t stop mentioning him in every random, unrelated thread.

The starlink was privately bought as per the article, it wasn’t officially procured using federal funds. So the comment I responded to doesn’t really make any sense in the context of this post.

But it gets 50 upvotes because Musk is very bad man. I guess that answers my own question about why people can’t stop mentioning him on Lemmy: it’s free upvotes to shit on him. That’s fine I guess, but it can be annoying when it clogs up the discussion in unrelated threads.

What dude are you referring to? I’m confused how your comment relates to the article.

A few things.

• Admins can and do ban accounts that downvote rampantly

• Obvious bot brigading is obvious. It became harder to tell on reddit when they started fuzzing the vote numbers, but could frequently still be figured out. It’s easier on Lemmy, someone just has to report some unusual voting pattern to the admin and they can check if the voting accounts look like bots.

• I was once told that the algorithm is less weighted towards upvoted comments and more weighted towards recent comments on Lemmy, when compared with reddit. I am not sure if this is true, but I have noticed that recent comments tend to rise above the top upvoted comments in threads when viewing by Hot.

• Without any way for bad content to be filtered out, you just end up with an endless stream of undifferentiated noise. The voting system actually protects the platform from the encroachment of bots and the ignorant mob, because it helps filter them out from the users who have something of value that they want to contribute.

Congratulations on your eleventy-first birthday, Mister Baggins!

I don’t think anybody is expecting women to do administrative work on behalf of men’s rights. It’s more that women tend to react with outright hostility when men advocate for other men.

It’s actually the feminists who frequently argue that men need to be fighting for women’s issues. I haven’t seen the reverse from male advocates, partially because it’s quite obvious that such a request would be summarily denied. Men generally just want:

• funding for men’s shelters

• sympathy & aid for male victims of domestic violence and sexual assault

• solutions for the growing educational achievement gap

• a discussion about various legal discrepancies when it comes to conscription, marriage, and parental rights and responsibilities.

None of this requires women to assist or flex their institutional power. But when men are systematically denied access and funding for various forms of governmental aid, it seems like certain women are flexing some of their institutional power to prevent men from having access to the same kind of social safety net that women enjoy.

It’s emergency airplane crash logic. Put your own supply of air on before you help the person next to you.

This is a faulty analogy, because men’s issues are women’s issues and vice versa. It’s impossible for women to actually solve their own problems without also solving men’s problems. How are women ever going to keep their oxygen masks on if they are surrounded by men who are suffocating and trying to rip the mask from their face? In order to help anyone, you need to help everyone.

To be fair, the men’s rights movement is absolutely characterized as alt-right by the mainstream media. People tend to assume all sorts of things about you when you bring up any kind of men’s issue. Most people (including other men) have difficulty empathizing with grown men, and thus they subconsciously expect that men’s advocates are motivated by something else, such as misogyny. It’s hard to move past our biological and cultural tendencies and view men as vulnerable and in need of support.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.