Comment on [OC] My feeling as European reading news on Lemmy/Reddit
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year agobut nothing I see in the world news rules about posting in languages that aren’t English
Isn’t it pretty obvious? If literally any European posted news in their native language, outside of the Brits and the Irish, it would be literally incomprehensible to 80-90% of the continent.
Not to mention ^(proceeds^ ^to^ ^mention)^ the problem that we don’t care about each other’s internal politics and don’t know enough about their context to follow them. People might follow the EU topics and the large-scale shitfests such as Brexit, French protests and of course the Russo-Ukrainian war. But that’s it.
E.g. I just realised that my country borders six other countries and I can’t name the current PM/president of two of them. (for somewhat excusable reasons, but regardless of that it’s not a good look)
At the rush of digging myself an ever deeper hole, then…why complain? I wouldn’t ask, but I see this complaint like every few weeks or so. If it literally can’t be a thing because of how Europe is, why blame America?
We do enough like real stupid shit people can be mad at us about. This one doesn’t seem like it’s on us.
Good question, though this was my first comment in the chain, I personally wasn’t complaining (yet).
To be honest, I’ve just checked the “Top Day” sorting of /c/world@lemmy.world, and the news are all about non-USA topics. So in hindsight I guess OP was just doing the usual “lol self-centred Americans” dunking. It is a fact that American news have pushed out the other countries’ news from the default news sub on reddit and here (or more likely the system was just replicated on Lemmy by default during the migration), so it’s a sort of folklore reaction… :D
To be honest, I’ve just checked the “Top Day” sorting of /c/world@lemmy.world, and the news are all about non-USA topics.
And now go on !news@lemmy.world, there’s no indication that it’s US news only, yet it’s almost all US news.
OP’s gif literally talks about ‘world news’, that’s why I focused on that sub. The division between ‘news’ (=American news) and ‘world news’ (=non-American) has been established on reddit probably like a decade ago because American news indeed used to overwhelm the rest; today there’s not much of a point to complain or act surprised about this “system”, considering that almost everyone is used to it.
I’m probably just approaching this wrong overall. I think it’d be interesting to see more non-US posts in places like world news, and it’s not that hard for me to run non-English posts through a translator to get the gist of them.
This is probably a terrible place to express it, and I’m probably being obtuse, but I want to see that in addition to posts like this complaint. I would read that. I would upvote that.
I dunno. As a Euro, I think World news (on Lemmy) is fine as it is. The most important events in the world will be covered in English, and the texts will be formed in an appropriate way - as I’ve said previously it can be difficult to grasp the specific national context for many events, and a good news article will compensate. E. g. if a country has chosen a new president, a foreigner first has to learn if the country has a presidential or parliamentary system, or the info won’t be understood properly.
I guess one could pick out the articles with more context, or add some context themselves?
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
As someone who lived in Europe for a bit, it seems like one reason for that is that, no matter who wins, the swings are smaller. No matter who wins in the elections, there don’t tend to be dramatic policy shifts. European politics often have multiple parties, with some parties containing complete nutters, but because those nutters are not in the main parties, the main parties are more similar.
In addition the US is the only remaining superpower, so US politics has a big impact on every European country, probably not as much as all their neighbors combined, but maybe more than any one of those neighbors on their own.