MudMan

Alright, let me take a step back to the OP.

The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

That’s the claim.

The counterclaim is that makes sense for US-based social media where most users are American. I dispute that because… well, most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

The logical way to organize that would be for the US politics channel, forum, magazine or whatever to be flagged “US politics” while everything else keeps its own qualifier. There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics. That makes logical sense, but it’s often not what happens in social media unless the specific social media site is heavily restricted to a specific non-English language or territory.

That’s the observation here.

Wait, what?

We’re talking about assuming that a site’s default user is from the US. I’m saying if 49% are not, then that assumption seems ethnocentric. That doesn’t require every other user to be part of a monolith of non-Americans, they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

That’s a big chunk of your users that don’t conform to your default use case. If this was about anything else you would not a default at all in that scenario, but that’s not what happens. Also, it’s not blamed on the “average American”, it’s being blamed on Americans as a whole, culturally, on the aggregate, which is fundamentally different.

This is true. I wonder how often people assume and don’t think anything of it because it doesn’t even register that they may not be correct.

That said, I once did have a long conversation here with someone who just straight-up refused to believe I’m not American and would not take my word for it. I never quite got why he believed I’d be lying about that, but that person would not be persuaded, and it was one of the most baffling interactions I’ve had in my life.

Well, yeah, but it’s not anecdotal. There is data to tell you how big Facebook is and was outside the US, in what territories and by how much relative to their US popularity at what point. My personal experience just happens to match those numbers (India, by the way, is Facebook’s current biggest market).

I would also point out that by your own data, which is accurate as far as I can tell, 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

Now, I agree with you that assuming things about anonymous accounts, and especially anonymous accounts writing in English, is foolish. Lots of people are fluent in English who are not native speakers and definitely who are not from the US. Most, in fact, depending on how you define your parameters.

I disagree that this is “human nature”, though. I don’t assume the same thing from people who speak my native language online. I also don’t assume the same thing about English speakers. The reason the OP is asking is that US ethnocentrism stands out. That’s not to say it’s not natural. We non-native dwellers in anglocentric social media will often comment on US cultural and political minutia, because US cultural and political minutia is present and relevant to us in a way ours isn’t to Americans (thanks for that, cultural imperialism). We pass for Americans in more situations than some American lurking in a German-language forum would, and we’re likely many times more numerous than… well, Americans lurking in German-language or Chinese-language socials.

But it being natural doesn’t mean it isn’t notable or an issue or a symptom of a dysfunction. Which it is, and it does annoy me for that reason.

… I am a non-anglophone who, at the time of Facebook’s raise to social media dominance lived in multiple non-anglophone countries. I was there.

In one of the places I lived there was briefly a popular local Facebook alternative. It lasted maybe a couple of years before entirely capitulating and getting absorbed. That place does still have a local Reddit-like alternative, and Reddit is certainly more US-centric. You are right that Facebook stayed popular much longer outside the US. It has started falling off in some of those places, but I did keep a Facebook account for work purposes for a lot longer than you’d expect because work relations in those territories would share Facebook credentials as a way to establish professional contact. Twitter may as well have been a lost ancient civilization, though.

There’s also a lot to unpack in the assumption that on a thread about “why do Americans default to assuming everyone is from the US” you’re reflexively lumping the entire anglosphere as part of the US, but honestly, I’ll let the recently annexed English-speaking countries deal with that one on their own.

So like Facebook and Reddit? Social media isn’t in English specifically. People who speak other languages often post in their native language for some things and in the lingua franca for more international conversations. The Internet is the Internet regardless.

I am fairly sure that the rest of the world already existed. And those formats keep being in use in newer places, too. This is not just a Reddit thing. Even you mentioned Facebook, which was instantly popular globally.

I’ve heard this more times, and it’s kind of baffling. The US isn’t even the biggest individual country on Facebook. What do people who assume everyone is from the US think a non-US “forum” looks like? Where do Americans think everybody else hangs out online?

I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.

It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.

But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.

Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.

I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.

I once had a guy walk into the subway, sit down, loudly declare he’d sneak into a military base, steal a tank and kill us all, then rant for a while about specific ways to kill his fellow passengers, including some very specific grenade action.

Then he sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, quietly turned towards the too-horrified-to-change-seats nerdy guy to his left and politely ask him if he had a lighter for his cigarrette.

It was a morning train, most people just kept trying to nap.

I know a few. Xerox is used for photocopying in other languages. Kleenex is the accepted term for “paper tissue” in Spain. Zodiac and Vespa are used for specific types of ship and motorcycle in multiple places, even when not manufactured by those brands. Thermos is a brand name, used in multiple countries as well. Sellotape is used in the UK for transparent sticky tape.

I don’t speak every regional variant of every language, but the short answer is this is definitely not a US thing. At all.

“Jello” is a brand name, which I think may be the example most people in the US specifically don’t realize. There are tons of others.

I think “googling” counts because a) it kinda makes sense even without the branding, b) I hear it all the time, and c) I say it myself even though I haven’t used Google as my default search engine for ages.

Yeah, this seems like one of those things where people casually discussing the issue are talking about wildly different scales. I, to be clear, am talking about having a hangover or sleeping in a rough position and pinching my neck once in maybe two or three months and refusing to take an analgesic to get through it faster. I get the feeling that what you’re describing is either on a way different level or a rarer interaction or side effect.

Which is why my other comment below still goes: if you need to deal with pain beyond sporadic usage to get through a one-off event, please go talk to a doctor and don’t listen to me or anybody else on the Internet.

Old USB implementation used to be a finicky nightmare, though. You make it sound like it wasn’t changed for a reason, MTP connectivity on Android as it is now is so much more functional, as well as safer.

In any case, that solves the misunderstanding. I thought you meant you couldn’t directly access phone storage anymore, which isn’t the case.

The printer scenario seems like an edge case to me. I mean, MTP has been the default for what? Over a decade? If you have a recent printer you’re probably fine (also, it probably has wifi and a dedicated mobile app or at least enough third party support to be used from your phone regardless). If your printer is older than that you’re probably better served by going through your PC first anyway. Sure, you don’t get direct USB access to printing photos, but now we’re talking about a very specific feature that was in use for a very specific sliver of time, and it requires you to be tethered to a device anyway. I don’t think that’s enough to justify legacy storage support on phones.

Cx Expolorer on Android can access network shares and Samba shares like a desktop OS. It really isn’t a particularly outdated option, it’s so much less fiddly than direct drive access from a PC and it effectively works just like a USB stick, interface-wise, without having to do the whole “where did I put my thumbdrive” dance each time.

Wait, what feature? You can’t access the phone’s storage? I’m pretty sure I can access my phone’s storage.

Define “slightest pain”.

If you’re in occassional discomfort and it’s impacting your wellbeing having an aspirin once in a while is probably not a huge deal.

If you have recurring pain constantly or frequently then you need medical attention and you should follow that guidance, not what anybody says on the Internet.

Man, this took me so long to get through my skull. I used to be a “I don’t need the medicine, why self-medicate when I can just endure it and it will go away”.

I got older, started having those little aches turn into ruin-your-day annoyances that only reset with a sleep overnight and now I mildly resent young me for being silly about it.