4mo ago

I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US

243 comments

Not on Lemmy. Om Lemmy you're 50% German, 50% American unless proven otherwise.
- 𝕯𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝕶𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖓𝖚𝖓 𝖟𝖚 𝕱𝖚𝖊𝖓𝖋𝖟𝖎𝖌 𝕻𝖗𝖔𝖟𝖊𝖓𝖙 𝕰𝖎𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕭𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖗𝖊𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖐 𝕯𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉!
- I have blocked sooooo many german communities and several german instances.
  I browse all to get as much new content as possible.
  But I have to block a shitload of stuff I am not interested in seeing.
  
  SPRICH DEUTSCH DU HURENSOHN
  
  Tja, da verpasst du was...
  Just learn German. Just do it
  
  I have filtered out some terms: elon musk and donald trump
- There was a fair amount of French language posts too, not sure how much quality and engagement they have.
- Well, then have some proof:
  G E K O L O N I S E E R D
  
  zeg makker
  
  Als een warm bad
- Du irrst dich, Brudi - niemand spricht Deutsch hier.
  
  Yo no hablar alemàn
  
  Da hast du wohl recht, ich habe noch kein einziges "du hast mich" bis jetzt (Verwenden Sie für den zitierten Teil nicht Google Translate)
- SPRICH
  
  ESPAÑOL
- Just like Reddit was back in the day.
- Alter.. das kann nicht sein
  
  Ja ech waar, ik maak geen gein
  
  Just like Geilenkirchen.
- Ja genau.
- I'm Scottish and don't know what the fuck % I am.
  I'm guessing 67% German, 22% American at this point.
- I assume 70% European 30% whatever else, although that depends on the instance. Of the instance gives any indication I just assume that.

I've heard it called "US Defaultism" where most Americans online seem to assume that everyone they interact with is from their country and all US news is considered significant even when it really isn't.
- Counterpoint: I rarely see non-US news posted. I do from time to time here on Lemmy, but it’s very rare.
  I might just be in the wrong communities though.
  
  That's because most of the world countries keep internal news, internal, but you're right tho, not enough representation makes people think like that
  
  The community news@lemmy.world used to have it in their rules, that it must be US news, same as on the old site. I just looked, and it's no longer a rule on lemmy.world
- I do this sometimes, and I hate when I catch myself doing it.
- Imagine if different fonts represented different accents.
  𝓗𝓸𝔀 𝓭𝓸 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓭𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸𝓸?
- I’ve been guilty of that- commenting before checking what community the post was in. Thankfully, I’ve found that most people outside of the US prefer gentle correction. Unfortunately, I doubt the average person from the US would show the same courtesy if the roles were reversed.
  
  I find that it correlates more with education status than nationality... but therefore it surely is more rare among the set of average Americans who have access to the internet than globally.

If I was using a website called "Facebloke" that was well known to have been made and ran in the UK, I'd assume everyone on it was British.
- Or the Australian version "Matebook", full with Aussies.
  Mate.
  
  We call it Cuntface down here.
  
  go to /r/mechanics
  full of utes
  I got no idea what I expected, m8.
- I'm ready to discuss maple syrup on HoserLoonieSorryEh
- Ah, yes! The 3 billion Americans on Facebook!
  And why would you make that assumption? The internet has no borders, so it doesn’t really matter where or by whom something is made. Especially if the language is English, which has somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion speakers worldwide.
  
  The internet has no borders
  Except that it actually does. See: China, North Korea, other fucked up governments that lock down the Internet for their people etc.
  
  “Facebloke”

...Anything written in English, and you can usually filter that even more by just looking for people using too many U's.
- people using too many U’s
  You mean people using British spellings right?
  
  Why whateveur dou you mean?
  
  One day if we are brave, we will get rid of the U in a lot of British words like color and armor, but by God we will keep the British U in the word glamour!
- I think you'll find most of the time the British use precisely the number U's they intend to though typos may afflict even the best.
- And when you do use those ⟨U⟩ (I do), people assume that you know what's going on in the UK (I don't.).
- What if i use "color", " gouvernment", "dialogue", " humor", "armor", " and "honour"
  
  I see you like to keep 'em guessing.
  
  I'd think 'who's this foucker?'
  
  Im gonna assume youre from the coast of Virginia and are transcribing your accent.
  
  Self leart second language, so it could be anything.
  
  Finally your edumacashun is compleute, go fourth and enjouy your freedumb! 😜
- and an aversion to Zees - I mean Zeds!

the default country
- Lmao no. God no.
  That implies every country started out as the US. Whereas the US is actually one of the youngest countries.

I'm from Australia and don't mind engagement with the (mostly) US content.
Let's face it, the US election is the most interesting event on the planet anyway.
- also one of the most concerning ones
  
  My favorite answer when internet Nazis asked "How could the Nazis have won?" used to be "Be America."
  It's not as funny anymore. They listened.
- I just wish Americans would have a little self awareness when engaging in foreign content.
  I was in a comment thread for a video on a report by the ABC about ADEs. Now I will give Americans the benefit of the doubt, we both have ABC networks, but ours clearly says "Australia", the news presenter has a Australian accent, and was talking about the Australian minimum wage, there were references to Centrelink and the Australian government repeatedly. If you watched the video and couldn't tell me what country the video was about, you need to go back to primary school, your media comprehension level is dysfunctional .
  I mentioned a clarifying point in the the comments about ADE being different from DES and giving numbers for each (you don't need to know anything about these acronyms), and someone starts arguing with me that when they were in the disability program they got xyz and they didn't have to do any of this. I replied saying that these processes have been unchanged for 20 years, I don't know how they're getting what they're getting, they have a unique case. They come back telling me everyone gets that, that's how it is, I need to do my research before I make stuff up. I explain that I work in the sector, I'm looking at the cases software, if they are indeed getting those services through that program, they are the only one of 40,000 people in the program getting that, because that's not how the service works. They tell me 15 million people people use the program. I finally realise what's happening. "there are only 25 million people people in Australia....you're a lost American aren't you?" and sure enough ,they politely reply with "oh yeah, I'm not Australian so I don't know, maybe it's different over there".
  And I just can't with that level of American stupidity.
  You can came into an Australian forum and assumed I wasn't Australian, assumed I wasn't talking about Australia, then came to the conclusion that "maybe it's different over there" when I had explicitly just informed you that ,yes, the law is different here.
  Now many times could I have used the acronym DES before the American thought to themselves "maybe this person isn't talking about SSDI".
  And this is just the example from the last hour. I end up in a lot of international PD sessions for my work, and something like this is a daily occurrence, only with the Americans.
  Canada, you are sadly not excused from this, nor sure why but it's always "okay, where are we all from? "Australia" "Belgium" "Brazil" "Indonesia" "Fort Freedom" "Edmonton"
  Those are cities and provinces, clearly the rest of us are doing countries, some of us are big enough that we could name states if we wanted to, but we're being polite, you've got 50 (10+3 🇨🇦 ) of them and we didn't memorise a silly song in school to learn your states.
  The fact that I know how many states the US has and how many provinces and tertories Canada has, but an American would be stabbing in the dark to guess how many states and territories Australia has, even though our biggest state is 3x bigger than Texas and Australia as a whole is a comparable landmass to the contiguous 48.
  
  And I just can't with that level of American stupidity.
  Not just Americans, most people don't read/watch the link
  The fact that I know how many states the US has and how many provinces and tertories Canada has, but an American would be stabbing in the dark
  Not surprising given our influence on your culture is far greater than the other way, landmass is worthless when it's full of the Outback (a beautiful place for sure)
  And you'd be surprised how many of us know it's 6, I bet. Californians get to play with you guys online if we stay up past our bedtimes, after all.
  The more fun part is going to be me trying to name them and see if I still can: Queensland, New South Whales, Western? Australia, Northern? Australia, Victoria (you already HAVE ONE NAMED AFTER THE QUEEN THOUGH), Tasmania? Is that one you guys?
  
  My stab in the dark is 8. That feels about right
- oh god, no
  I find a squirrel climbing a tree a more interesting event
  
  Not to worry, I'm sure that there are websites around that cater to your squirrel tastes
  
  To be fair, squirrels are pretty interesting.
- Glad everyone else is enjoying the show at least. Half of us here are terrified we're about to lose the country to maniacal egotists with a penchant for a bit of racism and monarchy.
  
  As a Canadian, we're feeling it too. I'm sure it's not as significant as what you're all feeling.
  It's weird having a half deranged megalomaniacal neighbor, where they're fine most of the time then occasionally go completely off the rails.
- Could not disagree more.
  It's a pathetic state of affairs that people here care and know more about US politics than our own country's, and I'm personally sick of it.

Haha. Like anyone lives outside the US
- Ahh the United States of America. What a fascinating planet.

Tbf it seemed to make more sense for the likes of Reddit, Facebook, etc. Similarly if I go to a Chinese forum I would not assume that everyone there was from the USA.
- 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?
  
  As a US citizen I think we forget how much of our shit gets out.
  I’m always surprised when I go abroad and people are up to date with somewhat niche US info. I was in Hong Kong and some local dude made a reference to the fatass NJ gov who was chilling on the closed beach during lockdowns.
  I do feel like I see far more people complaining about US people making assumptions than I do US people assuming. When I’m replying to someone I don’t put any thought into where they’re from unless they drop a context clue.
  
  NOW, but when Reddit started, and therefore the now infamous subreddit names were first doled out?
  
  Given how many people choose to speak their native language in the US (myself included), I guess they assume they post to forums that are in their language.

Maybe you should try posting more often then ;)

Assumed by Americans which is an important detail.
- To be honest I also find myself assuming this frequently. And I'm rarely incorrect
  
  Yup, if it's English-language, it's probably American unless otherwise noted

To be fair, the US has the largest number of English-speakers of any country in the world. As a first language, it has five times as many native English speakers as second place (the UK). It also has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world, meaning most of those English-speakers are also Internet users.
The US is a single country that is three-quarters the population of the entire European Union, and nearly all of its inhabitants speak English and use the Internet. So yes, if you pick a random user on an English social media page, odds are very good that person is an American. If you were to guess any random English-speaking Internet user's nationality, "American" is the best possible guess. But go on a Spanish language forum or a French language forum and nobody will assume you're American.
Consequently, Americans generate the majority or large plurality of English-language Internet content.
Edit: Please stop replying with "English is a lingua franca for non-native English speakers". I never made the claim that someone who uses English on the Internet is likely a native English speaker. I am claiming the converse—that people who natively speak English are likely to use English on the Internet.
- I’m sorry but this is nonsense. I’m in a lot of online communities where everyone uses English, despite it being nearly nobody’s first language. It just happens to be the only language that everyone there knows. Language is no indication of nationality, especially online.
  And to be honest, in those places the assumption is usually that everyone is European, which I can imagine is just as annoying for the stray American.
  
  I think you misunderstand.
  What I am saying is that of all Internet users that use English, Americans are by far the largest group due to it being a very large country, (third most populous in the world) with a high Internet penetration (97%), and whose residents speak English as their main language (78.3%).
- Americans generate the majority of English-language Internet content.
  Doubt.
  There are 1.3 billion people who use English on the internet as a first or second language.
  
  Not all Internet users generate the same amount of content. In addition to Americans being proud blabbermouths in general, people from wealthy countries generate more content than those from poorer countries. The US is among the wealthiest countries in the world.
  Although it is not the most representative, nearly half of all Reddit users are American. American media outlets have immense global reach. You can probably name four or five American media outlets just off the top of your head, even if you're not American. The USA's geopolitical power means people are always talking about American politics or what America's leaders are doing, which draws engagement from Americans like a lamp draws moths. 7 out of the top 10 English-language YouTube channels are American (fully or partially).
  It's pretty much impossible to prove, but I think the claim that Americans generate most of the content on the Internet is likely true or very close to true.
  It's even more convincing if you exclude English Internet users from India, as a quick visit to any forum dominated by Indian users will cause you to quickly realise that the language used there is not really English but a mix of English and Hindi which is not comprehensible to non-Indians.
- The more egalitarian principle would be to not assume. I won't deny that. People from more minority locales have every right to be upset at being marginalized.
  But at the same time, whenever I read passive aggressive comments on socials from residents of crown countries or from EAASL people around the world bitching about US defaultism as if people are doing it just to be ignorant dicks, I can only think to myself, "Uhh, hello? What do you think the demographics of this space were? What did you expect?"
  Americans are hardly the majority of the world's English speakers, but for all the reasons you listed, they tend to remain a massive plurality, if not an outright overwhelming majority, of any mainstream online English language platform. No, that's not a license to perpetuate US defaultism. But like... read the room, people. Your good fight is far more uphill than you seem to think it is.
- Consequently, Americans generate the majority of English-language Internet content.
  False. Yes, it is larger than any other individual English speaking group but accounts for less than a fifth of the total English speakers.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
  I wouldn’t have guessed Nigeria is the third largest English speaking group.
  
  This point was plainly addressed. Read carefully before going in guns-blazing.
  Do you think Nigerians use the Internet as much as Americans?
- Again, you are completely missing the point of the internet and English usage on it. People are using English as a lingua franca. There are a lot more non-native English speakers on the internet than native English speakers.
  So no, odds are not that it is an American you are speaking to, just because that person speaks English. You are literally regurgitating the fallacy that OP is about.
  
  We should really be counting English literate people, since nobody here is talking, and literacy is more reading/writing.
  Literacy is pretty broad too. It doesn't imply that it's your native language, nor if you can speak the language (whether you can do that very well or not).
  Literacy is going to be a bonefide requirement for most of the internet, with some exceptions, like text to speech and speech recognition stuff, people with disabilities who may not be able to see properly or at all.... Stuff like that.
  
  lingua franca
  I love that the real lingua franca, a term from both Latin and Greek roots, literally meaning the language of the Franks (French) is English. Plus, also, fuck you Esperanto!
- FYI
  According to Wikipedia the percentage of English speakers located in the US is lower that 20%. Does this mean that only 1 in 5 users is from the US?
  Population of the US: 334.914.895, Population of Europe: 745.173.774. 334.914.895/745.173.774 = 0,449%
  English Speakers in the US: 297.400.000. English Speakers in Europe: 260.000.000. So you have about 37,4M more English speakers in the US than in Europe.
  
  The average American uses only English language forums.
  The average European who speaks English will probably spend some portion of their time using whatever their native language is.
  The average English speaker in Africa is not as likely to have an Internet connection.
  The average English speaker in China is likely to not be able to access English social media sites (great firewall).
  Many English-speakers in India post online in a mix of English and Hindi that non-Indians find difficult to comprehend.
  You're correct that the claim that the US is ¾ the population of Europe is erroneous. But it is ¾ the population of the EU. I've corrected this.

I don't care where y'all are from as long as you're not a dumbass dickhead.
- Oh. I'm shit out of luck then.
  
  Well, I also sit in front of a mirror.
- Terrible news, guy who just started posting on the Internet

There are tons of tankie subs where you can masturbate to false expectations of the planet and openly hate people who you've never met before, check it out!
- ironically, tankies usually fall very deep into US defaultism, since everything everywhere is always the fault of the US
- Oh yes I forgot I blocked Lemmy.ml, no russian representation
  
  I'm willing to bet that very few people on Lemmy.ml are Russian.

I wonder if a news community with a "no mentioning the US" rule would work. Not out of any hate, just as something arbitrary like "don't use the letter E".
- There was one on Reddit that had a rule that no more than 50% of a story could be about the US and if the US was one of two parties they preferred the other point of view.

I hear you and am guilty of it myself. I feel like it's due to the anonymous nature of the internet. I think everyone immediately falls into the category of "peer" before putting a touch more thought into who the actual person (bot/ai) is that wrote the reply. Add that to the fact that most Americans see themselves (as a country) as the king of the world.
Maybe you can try typing with an accent, but I think that'd probably just be seen as a racist American.
- I'm not even American, I find my thoughts defaulting to this.

Jimmy Eat USA
- Bleed Earthlings

i live in DC and we get tagged for everything world politics.
forgive me for not caring if fvey countries get lumped into uspol.

The SMX "World Championship" just finished. It only takes place in the US.

as a person that came from 3rd world country, i relate T_T

As an American who just wants things organized clearly, I find it annoying too

Howdy y'all bros. My name is Todd Bonzalez and I am from one of the great American places foreigners know from your TV shows.

its just the loudest voices that seem to drive the world.

This is lemmy.world, you would have to join lemmy.{country} for lands beyond the fruited plains and purple mountains majesty.

Well Al Gore invented the internet so the internet is more a.USA thing 🤣🤣
- Heavily inspired by the french Minitel but yes
  
  Minitel launched in 1982, well after work had begun on interconnections between different computer networks, using the predecessor protocols to TCP/IP and what would become the addressing/domain name system. Minitel launched on protocols that were ultimately incompatible with the rest of the Internet, and didn't have an easy way to actually get joined in.
  Minitel was more of an alternative internet than it was the inspiration for the migration of the internet to becoming a HTTP/www-centered network.
  
  Heavily inspired by the Sumerian cuneiform but yes

As someone outside the U.S., what is your default persona for anonymous/pseudonymous users until you know more about them? Just curious. Like, if you don't have any information about them, do you read the words in the voice of a person just like you?
- I default to everyone sounding like Macho Man Randy Savage.
  
  Oh yeah!
- I don't read words in any voice other than the naturally subvocalisation that occurs when I'm reading, which is always in my voice.
  Even when I read a quote myself Morgan Freeman, I'm hearing my voice, doing a Morgan freeman impression.
  But in terms of who I picture? Nothing, people online are not even corporal beings to me until details are revealed. They are still human and have whole lives offline so that's not an excuse to be needlessly rude, but I know nothing of them so why would I randomly invent details unless I'm doing so as a "put myself in their shoes" thought experiment.
  But then I have a degree of aphantasia so I'm not "picturing" anything, all I have is words anyway, so it's easy not to add in extra words that change my assumptions about a person.

I completely understand the sentiment.
I also understand the sentiment that the internet is effectively a US invention dating back at least to ARPAnet.
I guess what I'm suggesting is: can't we all just get along? At least we can now all communicate with each other.
- We are trying to get along. We are already speaking English, which is a massive step in your direction. US commenters and posters don't even bother to convert to kilometres or something. Or the worst: write about something that happened in AK as if everyone knows postal shortages of the US.
  
  The crazy irony is that those from outside the US probably know way more than those in the US, in terms of stories about Alaska.
  No hate here. There will be ups and downs.
  At the end of the day, I'm happy to communicate with you.
  
  Don't ever talk about kilometres in here. Are you trying to spark an international incident?
  FWIW ich habe Deustch gelernt. Aber ich habe die meistens vergessen 😔
  
  If it makes it any better youre more likely to get an American who can convert Miles into Leagues before they even think about kilometers. We dont really use metric for anything, unless youre military or something.
- I also understand the sentiment that the internet is effectively a US invention dating back at least to ARPAnet.
  Yeah, but this is a website. Sir Tim Berners-Lee represent!
  Plus also, English is an English invention.
  But otherwise, you're good.
- The World Wide Web is not an American invention. Who invented what is completely irrelevant in this context anyway though.

You mean anything with~~out~~ world in its name?
- What? Like the World Series of Baseball?
  
  The name fits, it's just that the only people in the world who give a shit about baseball are from the USA.
- Sorry, anything with or without / everything not ich_iel

It does make it fun to stir the pot

Don't be so self-involved. Try visit China for once and you will get sick of the word "China", it's literally in everything there :), like communist party's intelligence service :)
- The thing is we are not talking about visiting countries. We are talking about the virtual World Wide Web.
  
  The "World" wide web not USA wide web

I mean the us dwarfs other english speaking countries
- Tons of people speak English as a second language, on the internet
- Your comment is very typical of that (fallacious) US centrism. People write in English on the internet because that is the universal language. There are far more secondary English speakers on the internet than primary English speakers.
  
  ~~because that is the universal language~~
  grince des dents*
  because it is the international language of this days and time.
- Yeah like India
  
  135 million english speakers is less than 300 million

network invented in America look inside Americans
How could this have happened?

This is why:

The US has more allocated IPv4 addresses and more users per allocated IPv4 address than any other country, by wide margins - and IPv6 adoption is not that widespread yet. It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
reference
- Nope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
  Strangely enough English is spoken in countries other than the US and even more use it as a lingua franca.
  It is interesting you think IPv6 is not widespreaad https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
  
  Of course English is spoken in other countries, and other countries have high numbers of internet users, but it does not follow that English is a commonly used language for internet users in other countries. Most Chinese are probably speaking Chinese, most Indians are probably speaking Hindi.
  The IPv6 graph you linked shows that adoption is still less than 50%, and I'm not clear on their methodology... does "users that access Google" mean users with Google accounts? or individual users that use google.com? or does it include all of their cloud services? do web servers linking content from Google Ads count? does this data represent mostly end users, or also infrastructure connections?
- 2016 is a little far, isn't it?
  
  I hate to say it, but, these things don't change a lot, or quickly.
  IP blocks, or "large groups of IP addresses" are assigned to regional internet registries, or RIRs which then hand them out from there. There's a couple RIRs. I think five in total? ARIN covers North America, and has, by far, the most IP addresses given out.
  There's also RIPE, in Europe, APNIC, for Asia and the Pacific areas, including China and Australia, AfriNIC, which is basically all of Africa... If that wasn't obvious. And lacnic, which is South America.
  Large IP blocks can, but rarely ever do, get transferred between RIRs.
  But wait, it gets more complicated. IP addresses allocated in one region could be used anywhere in the world. The vast majority are not, and it's important to note that because of global routing, you can't have a block smaller than 256 addresses allocated in the default free zone (DFZ). The DFZ is the part of the internet that doesn't have a "default gateway". All routes are advertised, and by those advertisements are learned by others. The routers in the DFZ only have so much memory, and there was a crisis a while ago when the memory of most of the routers in the DFZ were dangerously close to being full.... That was around when ipv6 was first switched on. The routing memory is extremely fast, because it needs to be. Looking up a route in a table with a million+ entries takes time, but that time needs to be so short that latency is effectively mitigated. So that memory is some of the fastest used in tech at times, notwithstanding newer technologies.
  I'm off topic. Anyways, my point is, ARIN is big. They have a lot of IPs. However allocation doesn't and shouldn't imply usage. A large number of addresses are allocated for US military use that are basically unseen in the internet. There's a few infamous /8 blocks of around 16.7 million addresses that don't get advertised and can't be used by anyone besides the US military. I forget which branch of military owns it. They've owned it since the internet started giving out allocations (more or less) and today one of those /8 blocks is worth billions, with a cost of about $50 per IP.
  So yeah, the US has a lot of IP allocation, they also have a large amount of unused IP addresses.
  
  I would love to see a more recent source if you have one.
  Regardless, possession of IP addresses doesn't change all that much. In the early days a company could buy an entire Class A (1.X.X.X) address space comprising 16million+ addresses for their private use. There are still many companies holding large blocks of addresses, and most of those companies are in the US, and they don't just give up those addresses.
  The point being, there's significant resistance to redistributing addresses once they've been allocated. They don't change hands terribly often (and keep in mind we're talking about actual internet addresses, not local network addresses that are being dynamically assigned and NATed across router domains).
- No, they highlight some problems with IP4: Bad distribution of IP4 ranges and bad usage of those ranges. So the graphs show the US has way too much IP actresses, some under used/unused and some overused. The blog post they are from is pretty clear about this.
  These graphs do not give an indication of how many users per country there are. There are in fact statistics on that which expectedly show China and India on top. These however do not take into account that social media use way more popular in the U.S. for now.
  The closest stat may be Reddit users by country which seems to indicate that about every 2nd user is from the US. (Not sure if Russian/Chinese bot accounts also count towards these though).
  
  These graphs do not give an indication of how many users per country there are. There are in fact statistics on that which expectedly show China and India on top.
  Well sure, but people from those countries are far less likely to be speaking English, which is why I said:
  It is entirely rational to assume that an English-speaking person on the Internet is from the US, given no other information.
  The prevalence of internet use in countries with primary languages other than English has no bearing on this statement.
  The point of using the IP address statistics is to show that the vast majority of websites on the Internet were created in the US for the US market, and that is still true today.
  On a side note, the distribution of addresses is unbalanced but it isn't "bad". It is a consequence of a system growing over time. Communications infrastructure cannot pop into existence everywhere all at once, and realistically not many people outside the US had any interest in the internet in 1983.
- That would be 3 addresses per US citizen. You have some whales like MS in there, just because your companies can grow dangerously big.

Aren't the majority of English speakers from the US?
EDIT: The USA has 3x the population of the UK and Australia combined and the USA appears to be the home of approx 60% of native English speakers. However there are billions of speakers if you include it as a 2nd language. Which Americans don't speak 2nd languages so we obviously don't count that.
- I'd just like to mention that plenty of ESL users speak English more than their native, and that the country with the most people who use English for interacting with the Internet, it's probably India. Indians communicate to a lot of their compatriots in English, since they are also an ex-British colony, and have a large variety of native languages.
- What's your definition of first/second language if you grow up bilingual?
  The majority of English speakers aren't from the US, though the US does have the most English speakers. Important distinction to make!
- No, it's roughly 20% (297M/1537M). Source.
- That sounds like America's problem. Big portion of western eu, especially non-boomer and non-french, comprehend English ~~very~~ well, so I dunno why you'd just dismiss it in a post about us-defaultism when almost everything is text based
  
  That was the joke.
- English (excl. creole languages) l1 380 million l2 1.135 billion total 1.515 billion
  
  Nah its 50/50, either you're a USA English speaker or you're not

This meme is essentially Al-Qaeda's motive for doing 9/11.

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