Hacker News Reader

Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

what is "our" government? this site is worldwide..

Fairly certain you can apply this to nearly any government.

Any government with the resources to do it, probably is.

I like this comment because I always assume a majority of people here are Americans, but I'm not, and maybe it's not true anymore.

I'd be willing to bet that less than half of this site's users are American. There is a huge software engineering community in Europe, for example, and there are more Europeans than Americans, let alone the large populations of Asia, Australia, New Zealand...

Psssssh, everyone knows that New Zealand doesn't exist, it's why it's not on any maps!

I've (unfortunately) got a habit of accidentally assuming forums are "in the US". I think I would put it down to a couple of things:

1. Most native English speakers are in the US, so the accidental assumption that someone is American is more often than not correct.

2. The internal voice that reads text to me has a generic male American accent.

The US is the largest country with english speakers, but it does not have the majority of speakers [1] (just India plus Pakistan have as many). So your assumption would be wrong, even based on statistics.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English...

That's why I qualified it with "native" - the US has by far the most English-as-a-first-language people. In my head everyone speaks like an Anglo guy from Idaho, and since HN is text-only, metaphorically speaking the lights are out, so I'm left without a clue where other people are sitting or where they are from.

In other words, if you found yourself in a dark room with a thousand English speakers who all sounded like Jesse Pinkman, what country would you assume you were in?

English is the dominant second language in the world.

I would agree with that, at least for this site. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio was 1 to 10, since tech skews it significantly. For example, I work in tech in the US, and the only American I've spoken to today was my summer intern, and - oh hold up, I just typed that and realized she's from Canada. OK, I've been in work meetings all day and I have not spoken to a "US American" during that time. I suspect that other sites, particularly some subreddits, are mostly American, though.

> 2. The internal voice that reads text to me has a generic male American accent.

That's weird and pretty interesting if your own accent isn't a male American accent.

Take your pic, most G8-20 are doing this.

Pick one

Y Combinator is an American company and the website is hosted in the US.

Personally I think that "X is an American site" is over-used and doesn't actually make all that much sense when applied to things that cover general world-spanning issues.

But that's my opinion.

no one implied that, stop being silly

> Y Combinator is an American company and the website is hosted in the US.

What else would this imply?

I wrote a stupid message first that the person above you replied to accurately, I changed my stupid message to be less stupid while still reflecting my opinion on the matter.

Thank you for saying this so I don’t look insane, ahaha

Ah, sorry. Didn't realize it was edited.

Google, reddit, amazon, twitter, and every meta website too.

This is a dumb observation.

US people needs to stop pretending the USA are the only place that matters on earth.

This article is about France tho.

What relevance does that have to the question, may I ask. Do you think, for example, that every user of Twitter is American because Twitter is an American company?!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com