[brookst]

Isn’t it kind of implicit in the English language description? Like if there was a site/post “les cent meilleurs livres de 2023”, it would be fairly unsurprising if they were all in French.

I would love a more inclusive, multilingual culture, but I’m not sure qualifying sentences to refer to the language they’re written in is the right place to start?

[infruset]

There would never be a site/post "les cent meilleurs livres de 2023" on a global discussion board such as this because by definition it would not be in English. There might be a "the best french books of 2023" post, although there wouldn't be, because French books simply don't exist in the anglosphere, but my point is precisely that the global conversation happens in English, the only word that ever reaches it is "book", and it's never about anything else than English books.

[RugnirViking]

You're just wrong. You're defining "global" discussion boards to only include that which is in english. There are vast francophone sections of the internet, not to mention chinese, malay, hindi, spanish etc. You are fully welcome to go and look at these places as well; they are also global in the same sense that y combinator is.

hacker news is a discussion board attached to a startup accelerator based in silicon valley. it's only global because many people find the content that's *already here* valuable.

[infruset]

> You are fully welcome to go and look at these places as well; they are also global in the same sense that y combinator is.

Allow me to respectfully disagree: they are not. The dominance of US culture around the world, for the best and for the worst, is a fact of life for all of us who live outside it. If you look at the rates of translation of books from and to English, you will immediately see where the center and the periphery lie.

[Jakob]

That seems to be an isolated standpoint. While the US and UK undeniably have a big influence on global thinking, they are surely far from dominant in any than some specialised categories?

Going through some the biggest countries by population: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Iran, UK, Germany, France, which one would you say would have a big to moderate US cultural influence? I would say UK, Mexico, and to a lesser degree Germany, and then France, everything else hardly?

Book publishing looks also healthy in a lot of countries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_...

[infruset]

Random people from all these countries can name of the top of their head a bunch of any of the following:

- US presidents

- US pop artists

- US filmmakers

- US cities

- US CEOs

- US companies

- US TV shows

I stopped there but I could go on for long. Now, take any country X other than the US and ask a random resident of any of the other countries to name just one of each category: a president of X, a CEO, a film, etc... If you think the answer has any chance to compete with the equivalent question asked of the US, well, I think you don't realize how big the cultural influence of the US is. What is domestic news in the US is still news in the rest of the world, but the reverse is simply not true.

[Jakob]

We apparently live in very different societies.

Of course a random Indonesian would know Indian, Chinese, and French presidents, and vice versa. Young people I see hype up Korean bands. Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Indian companies are well known and highly influential (Ant, Tata, Huawei, all car brands, Samsung, Sony, Nintendo, …). Who are US filmmakers that are more known than non-US ones, Spielberg and Nolan?

Your experience is obviously vastly different. Let’s just not state it as fundamental truth.