9
votes
Create a ~worldnews, also another group idea.
~news will be populated with mainly U.S news and also mainly U.S politics, ~worldnews could be a group for just world news and events.
also there is a sub r/globaltalk which is basically focused around soft-core news events from around the world. An example of this is this post: "Man tries to open plane’s door, thinks it’s way to the loo - Times of India." it is just like interesting news stories that aren't too serious from around the world. Not sure if that would fit here, just a sugesstion
~news + filtering out the
usatag = "world" newsAnd in time a ~news.casual, ~news.uplifting and various others (likely even region specific ones like ~news.usa, ~news.canada, etc) will likely be added, however for now there are not enough users or activity to justify fracturing the communities too much more yet, IMO.
p.s. Another "additional groups recommendations" related ~tildes.official post is likely coming soon though, so keep an eye out. ;)
...and if needed moving forward we can have a ~news.world or ~news.international for general international topics.
@lambda the Tildes Mechanics Doc explains how groups and the sub group hierarchy will work moving forward.
One of the biggest drawbacks I had found in Reddit before it went downhill with commercialisation was its parochialism: subs with generic names (r/news, r/politics) deal with US-only issues, whereas global issues subs have
worldin their names.I think generic groups, which cover everything now as there are too few topics to subdivide, should eventually focus on globally important content (note that many US “local” news are globally important). Non–US users should not get an impression that Tildes is yet another American-by-design social network with international content being just a tolerated extension.
Tildes should use the advantage of being able to learn from others' failures.
The U.S as default country is fairly annoying. And comes with a certain amount of arrogance attached to it, in my opinion.
I don't know if its arrogance so much as statistics. We're the largest English speaking population by a massive margin. Chances are that if you're talking to a random person online who speaks English as their first language, they're American.
Statistics is one thing. Statistics, as you say, makes it likely that any random native-speaker of English is an American: you make up approximately two-thirds of all native speakers of English (250 million out of about 350 million).
Arrogance is ignoring other statistics and broader demographics.
Native speakers of English are not the only users of English you'll find on this here world-wide web. There are 1,200,000,000 speakers of English around the world, including more than 800,000,000 people who use English as a second language. In this context, those 250,000,000 Americans are only about 1 in 5 speakers of English around the world. You're outnumbered 4:1. The chance of encountering a non-American using English is about 80%.
The arrogance comes when, with an 80% chance of another person on the English-speaking internet being a non-American, Americans assume that most (or all!) people on the internet are Americans. The arrogance comes when asking for legal advice on the internet, but not even bothering to mention that the advice should be relevant to the USA. The arrogance comes when posting a topic about the US Supreme Court and tagging it "supreme court", even though there are many Supreme Courts around the world (we have half a dozen state Supreme Courts in Australia alone!). The arrogance comes when someone says that a default group for news should cater to US news, and all other news should be in the "
other" "world" category.The statistics don't justify the arrogance.
Source for statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Tildes is also Canadian, so maybe Deimos will be interested in avoiding the US centrism
No. Just no. I will not have the USA become the default option here. I have been regularly posting Australian news and some other non-US news in ~news to prevent precisely this outcome. I will not have anything that isn't about the USA relegated to "other" (even if it's euphemistically referred to as "world").
What I want to see is a series of sub-groups for news in each country: ~news.usa, ~news.australia, ~news.unitedkingdom, ~news.china, ~news.russia.
I can't speak for everyone but I definitely appreciate that. And I 100% agree with you about wanting to see regional subgroups eventually, especially ~news.usa so it isn't the "default" country for ~news like it is on reddit.
That's the idea, yeah. When stories are all bubbling up from those into ~news, that'll turn ~news itself into 'world news.'
We're going to be a slave to our English and tech-savvy demographics for a long time. Internationalization isn't high on the list of priorities for a young alpha site, and it seems like STEM always comes into these places first. That's fine, in fact it's kinda normal if you look at the history of social services going back to usenet.
We can plan to end up in a different place, though, and having ~news become all the important news from all over the world is definitely the best place to go. US-centrism on reddit has always bothered me a bit. I'd be disappointed if that happened here in the long term. Some of it in the short term is inevitable but let's not make groups that force us down that path.
I wonder if open registration by geo-ip would help with this. We could do open-registrations targeted at places around the world that are lacking in representation, so for example one entire registration drive could bring in just Japanese users, or just Australians, etc.
I don't think that's ever been tried before. Seems like it'd bring in more perspectives and more diverse opinions which would be a major boon to the site. It'd also break down groupthink a bit if people from all over the world were a much larger portion of the user base than just the USA.
Tell me about it! As a non-STEM person, that's been an ongoing (but only occasional) frustration here. I just grit my teeth and remind myself it won't be like this forever. :)
I don't think we need to go down that path. That smacks a little bit of tokenism. We discussed this idea already in a slightly different context, and it was an extremely controversial idea.
I think if we just build the structures that allow for inclusion and equality, that's a big step forward. If people come here and see that ~news.usa is just another group alongside ~news.japan and ~news.australia, they'll get the message that one country won't be allowed to dominate this website. Coincidentally, Deimos said pretty much the same thing in that other discussion about this idea.
It's clashes of points of view, rather than content type.
Doesn't seem relevant. Recruiting minorities by actively posting about Tildes in their online spaces isn't at all the same thing as leaving certain geo-ip ranges more open for registration.
I don't see the functional difference between this:
And this:
In both cases, you're targetting certain sections of the population for special treatment in getting invitations.
Not that it matters. I doubt any of these focussed recruitment drives will ever actually happen, so the whole discussion is probably moot.
I was thinking of it more in terms of using the slow-growth model to our advantage. When we're doing open registrations, if Tildes ends up as the top link on reddit or something else similarly viral, those registrations will be suspended until the 'wave' passes. We'd have the opportunity to leave some ip ranges open even then if we wanted rather than completely closing down registrations. That's the least-bad way I can think of to intentionally globalize the userbase away from being mostly US/Europe users.
Not that we need to do that, but the opportunity will be there. By the time we get to open reg phase it might be redundant, we might be plenty diversified by then. Time will tell.
I see the difference in active vs passive. That previous thread was talking about sending people out to other forums to promote and invite minority groups. This is simply biasing the availability of the open registration process in favor of certain countries over others - during the open reg phase, not forever. It's active recruitment vs passive filtering which seems night and day to me.
I really don't like the trend of assuming anything post or area that doesn't mention a country is America by default. Why is ~news for Americans and ~worldnews for non Americans? It would make sense to have worldnews being very large news events that affect people from all over the world.
I'd like to eventually see something like
~news.global for massive stories
~news.africa or ~news.asia etc for stories involving two or more countries on a continent
~news.africa.namibia etc for more local stories
And possibly going as far as, for eg: ~news.africa.malawi.blantyre or ~news.usa.florida.miami for hyperlocal stories.
I think that'd be overkill, and most internationally relevant news are often intercontinental too (US and EU, US and China, Russia and EU, Russia and US, China and Africa, etc.), and most socioeconomic groupings include multiple continents (Middle East: Europe, Asia, Africa; Europe: Europe, Western Asia, Caucasus, parts of Near East; West: North America, Europe, etc.). I think having countries and cities share a unique or hierarchical namespace should not only suffice but be the best way to go: e.g. ~news.turkey & ~news.istanbul or ~news.turkey.istanbul (where we're having a nice chilly rainy autumn these days). I think having countries and cities separate is better because cities/regions can switch countries and whether we switch or not could end up being a difficult and highly political one: I'd rather not have us choose between ~news.ukraine.crimea or ~news.russia.crimea, ~news.crimea would be better.