In particular, I’m referring to the people who would be redditors, but don’t really use English. All the main Reddit subs are filled with English, and the few outposts on Reddit that mainly are not English are relatively small. This leads me to believe that such speakers must be going somewhere else for their Reddit-esque needs.
A few locations I’m already aware of:
- South Korea uses arca.live
- Japan uses LINE
- The PRC uses Baidu Tieba
- Russia uses Pikabu and VK
Do any of you know of any other non-English Reddit equivalents? I’m interested in how countries outside the US handle their social media.
The Germans are definitely just using Reddit. As the other commenter said, compare the numbers of native speakers of e.g. German (about 100 million) with those of English (about 400 million) and then consider how much more common English is as a second language compared to most other European languages. Spanish is probably the biggest question mark here, they actually have more native speakers than English. There is also the possibility that Reddit-style platforms just aren’t as popular everywhere, it appeals to a particular demographic that might just not be as big in e.g. Colombia as it is in, say. Sweden.
Right. I figure that most Germanic and Romance speakers would be using Reddit. But that does leave the question of where those who don’t speak a European language, and don’t care to learn one, go - I know for sure that there are a notable number of Chinese and Japanese people who only speak their language, and use machine translation if they need to use another.
Can’t blame them, learning a language from a completely different language family is really hard, especially if you also have to learn a completely different writing system (though the latin alphabet is at least objectively simpler than the chinese and japanese writing systems). I lucked out because German and English are closely related, but I didn’t even manage to properly learn Spanish despite trying for 6 years.