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Comment by rogerclark | Hacker News Reader

It's only not sad if you live with a completely utilitarian life where art and the beauty of human creation have no value.

Why don't we all just listen to one song, wear the same outfit and live in identical homes?

Regardless of whether they're useful, unique and irreplaceable information will be lost when minority languages are gone, as this information exists only in the minds of the remaining speakers. It isn't possible to back up this kind of information like we do with the Internet Archive or something.

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Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Wouldn't being able to have a meaningful conversation with someone completely and totally different than yourself inspire you? Isn't that what made the internet a thing? It's really just a set of communication protocols that everyone agreed to speak.

I think if you take a look at the internet, you’ll discover that there are large numbers of people who speak the same language who can’t have meaningful conversations or inspire one another.

Language isn’t the barrier here.

The sadness of losing a language is distinct from the question of whether it would be better if everyone spoke the same language.

>Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity?

Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences.

>the internet

Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.

> Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.

Right but the point is that all of these independent subgroups use the same protocols to communicate (i.e. web standards). Anyone who has a client that can understand these is able to interact with the entire internet. As we can see, standardizing protocols does not limit the ideas which can be expressed over those protocols.

I guess it depends where you consider the separation. Even among the web, people don't only post in one language. And among the English-speaking web, Reddit has absorbed forums almost entirely which I would consider to be a negative.

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