Hacker News Reader

Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

It's weird to think that there's are entire Cyrillic, Chinese, and Spanish internets out there that are practically invisible to us in the anglosphere. I wonder what their versions of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, and Hackernews are...

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One of the most delightful yet surprising things about learning another language is to see a whole new part of the internet (not to mention "the world") become accessible and unveil itself to you. After my time with Spanish, as an example, I can say that I've become reasonably certain that the Spanish speaking world produces the most hilarious white-hot memes on the planet.

I'd also note that many "social" networks are barely on the Web any more (while still being on the Internet) - can you really say that you're on the Web if you don't let your website be crawled by search engines ?

For instance, Discord isn't being crawled, Instagram and Twitter tend to be very annoying about having to create an account with them.

Reddit (and HN) have a separate issue in that they fundamentally violate netiquette by locking threads and preventing necroposting even WHEN it's what should be done (also in case of Reddit, frequently (ab)using shadowbans).

vk.com was/is Russian Facebook similar service. I know there's more, but that's the only one that springs to mind. Oh... Orkut... that became big in Brazil, IIRC, but I don't think it was entirely non-english.

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