[variety]

But as the community is growing, this is kind of inevitable. And desirable.

What HN needs is enhanced search (and tagging) capabilities, precisely to allow user to select content from specfic regions (and in different languages).

For example, I think it'd be extremely useful to be able to bring up posts specifically about China, or Paris, or only in French or Russian.

[rednum]

I think it is desirable too. European version of Hacker News would be extremely useful for me - sure, there's lots of region-agnostic valuable content, but also many topics considering startups are irrelevant to people in my area (Central Europe) - for example 'whos hiring?' threads consist mostly of offers in US (and of course offers from Europe would be much more useful for european hackers)

[pdelgallego]

I also think that it would be very interesting an European Version of HN. But, I'm not that sure that it will reach the critical mass of users that make a community vibrant.

[mhd]

Yes, you probably have a fragmentation of topics, i.e. the startup stuff will be posted on the European site, but the "hacker" articles of general interest will be posted and discussed here. Which seriously restricts the user base and thus the helpful answers on the Euro site.

I could imagine something that works, if you're willing to fragment even further and make language-specific sites, as this way you could post articles in languages other than English and you'd get discussions from those users who don't feel that comfortable in English. But that further restricts your user base. Might work for French and German, but beyond that? (Spanish, too, of course, but then you'll run into problems with the country/law specific stuff)