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Comment by thebluesky | Hacker News Reader

The article is actually about Zimbabwe, not South Africa.

I think what he means is that the title is excessively general "Why it's hard to love Google Plus in Africa". It's a bit like writing about the trouble you are having getting a fast Internet connection in Guatemala and then saying "North America" has connectivity issues. Different countries in Africa are very different from each other. It's like generalizing across Cambodia and Japan because they are on the same continent. Big difference...

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Fair enough, I agree that the author was guilty of the kind of continent-wide generalisations that's always misleading.

I was just a bit confused by the parent post's reference to South Africa, which was a bit off-topic as the author is from Zimbabwe. My assumption was that there were two possible explanations, that the post's author confused South Africa with Southern Africa, or that they considered South Africa to be so much of an outlier in this regard (which it isn't) that the submissions from South Africans weren't relevant. Either explanation would be wrong and worth correcting.

I'm the author.

Indeed Zimbabwe is not representative of all Africa. However, Zimbabwe actually has better internet that most African countries. At least it's in the top 10 of 54 countries on the continent according to Ookla (http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/)

If Zimbabwe's internet is bad enough to cause users problems loading Google+, It's likely worse in the majority of the countries on the continent.

Generalising therefore was not meant to paint the picture that all Africa is the same, but that Google (if they read this) need to have a strategy that takes into account the poor internet quality the bulk of Africa has.

Thanks for responding.

I do understand the point you were making, but unfortunately it does create the potential for your point to be forgotten as the discussion gets derailed into what is and what isn't representative of Africa. It may have been better to make that part of your title the 'Developing World' or something similar.

In any case I agree with the point you were making, which is that too many sites, especially social networking sites, are paying too little attention to optimising the experience for those on slower connections with high latency. So kudos for raising it and pointing to a specific example (Google+).

Here in Rwanda we keep hearing how we have the 3rd fastest internet in Africa according to Ookla, but it's kinda nonsense because Ookla measures speed to the nearest Ookla server. In Rwanda the internal infrastructure is great and there's an Ookla server in Kigali so it thinks we have great internet. But that doesn't take into account the connection to the rest of the world which isn't so great.

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