hacker news is a discussion board attached to a startup accelerator based in silicon valley. it's only global because many people find the content that's *already here* valuable.
Allow me to respectfully disagree: they are not. The dominance of US culture around the world, for the best and for the worst, is a fact of life for all of us who live outside it. If you look at the rates of translation of books from and to English, you will immediately see where the center and the periphery lie.
Going through some the biggest countries by population: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Iran, UK, Germany, France, which one would you say would have a big to moderate US cultural influence? I would say UK, Mexico, and to a lesser degree Germany, and then France, everything else hardly?
Book publishing looks also healthy in a lot of countries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_...
- US presidents
- US pop artists
- US filmmakers
- US cities
- US CEOs
- US companies
- US TV shows
I stopped there but I could go on for long. Now, take any country X other than the US and ask a random resident of any of the other countries to name just one of each category: a president of X, a CEO, a film, etc... If you think the answer has any chance to compete with the equivalent question asked of the US, well, I think you don't realize how big the cultural influence of the US is. What is domestic news in the US is still news in the rest of the world, but the reverse is simply not true.
Of course a random Indonesian would know Indian, Chinese, and French presidents, and vice versa. Young people I see hype up Korean bands. Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Indian companies are well known and highly influential (Ant, Tata, Huawei, all car brands, Samsung, Sony, Nintendo, …). Who are US filmmakers that are more known than non-US ones, Spielberg and Nolan?
Your experience is obviously vastly different. Let’s just not state it as fundamental truth.