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Comment by pterhx | Hacker News Reader

In photography (and probably art in general), there's a composition "rule" to frame moving subjects from left to right.

So the direction may not be that interesting!

The other thing to consider (as someone who frequently take a photos of their bike) the common direction has the drive side out! In cycling forums it is sacrilegious to post a photo of your bicycle without showing the drive side.

Beat me to it - but I had the same thought. Most amateur and nearly all professional studio photographs of a bicycle will have it drive side out so I expect this plays some role in it.

> the common direction has the drive side out

Took some searching and sleuthing to actually figure out what "drive side out" means, as I'm just a casual "from A to B" cyclist: apparently this is referring to the side the chainset, chainwheels and all those things are on.

I wonder if that changes in countries where the main language is written right to left?

That was my first thought too, I wonder if it works the same in countries speaking arabic (as that's the first one i could think of that's a language with truly no-buts right to left writing).

Arabic native speaker here.

Yes, people will usually post or draw a bicycle right to left which is going to ve opposite of what normally is drawn. I tried the prompt in arabic for many models and I don't recall any adjusting it based on that difference at least culturally speaking.

It is. All over the Arab world, imagery in ads is “backwards” and I believe several companies will flip their ads horizontally, and UI localization involves flipping graphics.

Do the gears and stuff sit on the other side of the bike in the Arab world? Otherwise I'd expect cycling ads to still show a bike going from left to the right, considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951828

Is it culture dependent? Is it because in English we read left to right?

There was a glorious moment when I thought that the Chinese models were more likely to produce right-to-left cycling pelicans, but sadly that trend didn't seem to hold up.

Chinese is also written left to right

For almost the last 70 years, Chinese has been left to right.

Before that it was vertical (although the ordering of the columns was right to left).

Arabic or Hebrew would be better tests for that.

side scrolling video games were always moving from left to right

Well except for Jungle King

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