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.
I think people overestimate how many of the English comments are written by native speakers. By using English, you have a much larger audience, especially for niche subjects. I almost never use my native language on the internet.
Honestly, i don’t know, but setting up some website that’s vaguely similar to reddit, is not that hard. (Building a community and maintaining tech and community is harder.) Thus, there are probably tons of reddit-like places, some bigger, some smaller.
Before reddit and facebook, there were forums (like bb boards). Some have survived (in niches). Some communities have huge Facebook groups, used with fake accounts for shitposting. Some people use twitter/bluesky/mastodon as a reddit substite.
I guess that Instagram and TikTok have most of the market in many countries. People won’t tell you how much time they spend on tiktok, but they still do.
People usually use DOUBAN in china, and now little redbook is much more popular than Tieba.
Ehh… arca.live isn’t really like reddit, maybe more like 4chan lmao
LINE isn’t like reddit either, it’s more like whatsapp or telegram
due to cultural differences i doubt there are true equivalents. there are some non-english speaking subreddits btw
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.
hmm, just because non-english subreddits are small doesn’t really tell us much here. Non-English speaking monolinguals are used to smaller communities (let’s ignore China and India for the sake of this thought experiment) simply because the number of the speakers of their language is smaller. So a subreddit of a smaller size wouldn’t be particularly surprising here
those folks often use the same social media platforms within their own linguistic bubbles. Not always, of course, you gave examples of websites used by specific language speakers, but i’m just pointing out how this might not be a universal fact for every language
Isn’t LINE more like Whatsapp? I’ve never heard of it having a Reddit-like function.
I figured reddit may have been translating some of its pages automatically. I have seen some posts with the exact same comments fully translated between English German and French.
Could also be multilingual third party bots.