I think the main issue might be language. For companies, the english block is a huge benefit. If I launch a company in the UK, I have customers in Canada, India, United States, Australia, and New Zealand right of the back. I can then focus on refining the product and get into the mindset of making the product better for different international audiences.
Secondly, the english block tends to have a similar legal and regulatory mindset in dealing with companies. The Chinese system seems opaque and hard to understand for outsiders and for good reason. There is a lot of government influence and thinking that shapes Chinese products which doesn't appear elsewhere. That is a huge disadvantage.
When you consider all the of the other issues a young company face, having a huge multi-national singular language and somewhat similar regulatory framework is helpful in getting started.
Just look at the EU. We have a much bigger population than the US, but most speak their own language, which makes grow from lets say Germany to France or Spain a bigger issue than from the US to Canada.
It's also dramatically easier to gain huge scale in the US market first, then lean on that scale to take over smaller foreign markets one by one, even if it's expensive to do so (setting up a david v goliath scenario in the smaller market). Whereas the reverse scenario is perhaps 10x or 100x more difficult. How does a social network that wants to start in eg Portugal, defeat Facebook? That's extremely difficult on a local basis, and that much more difficult if you then want to try to grow up and out of Portugal and take over other Facebook markets.
Facebook by contrast, by the time they fully dominated just the US market, had a billion dollars per year (doubling annually) in cashflow to throw at expansion globally. If you flip that down to a smaller market, and say you start in Estonia and capture that market (while somehow fending off Facebook), how much cashflow do you have per year to spend on trying to take the next market? How well protected is your home base from Facebook taking it from you in the meantime, and so on. The US/Canada + english starting advantage is extreme.
Not true for Asia. Perhaps some smaller South-East Asian countries have seen the writing on the wall and started learning Chinese, but for the most part the defining characteristic of Asian countries is that they each pretend they are the only Asian country.
For Africa either English or French, probably one of each, for the Middle East either French or English, French for former French colonies, English for the Gulf because all the IT people are from the Indian subcontinent, maybe Arabic for Egypt and the Levant but probably English too. Educated Arabic speakers have to learn one of English or French to be anywhere near state of the art in anything. More books are translated into Dutch every year than into Arabic.
It would look like the current EU Hacker News: nonexistent.
Despite having, relatively speaking, [some islands of] fairly decent English education, EU doesn't have broad native-level English literacy. The level of discussions in English is fairly low, and people are not as likely to recognize or casually learn cross-disciplinary jargon like full time English speakers.
It's relatively straightforward for a native English speaker to enter into discussions at the level of HN, but for somebody who does not use English absolutely every day in every function of daily life, it'll be a chore.
What exactly to you base your assertions on? For me as a Norwegian it is perfectly natural to read HN. For many Europeans tech is primarly done in english. When studying at Uni we use english books in most tech fields. Most European countries are too small to rely exclusively on a home market and hence is used to doing businness abroad and working in english. I work for a Norewgian company but all our company wide emails are written in english and so is most documentation. In fact our software does not exist with an Norwegian language localization. And as with many other Norwegians and I suppose many other europeans I have no idea what most software concepts are called in my native language.
While lots of professionals speak English more or less well, what is telling to me and a big indicator that the situation does not look as good as some people want to believe is the fact that there is hardly any English-language cinema or movies/series (on TV).
Even where I am, a major German city, there is the one huge cinema complex (10 cinemas) that only shows 2 or 3 English language movies - in their smallest rooms and with less than 10% of seats taken. Every single movie and TV series gets German speakers for this market.
I can't say how reliable of an indicator this is, but I think given that this stuff (TV and cinema) still is a huge part of daily mass entertainment the fact that those offering the (often originally US-made) material choose to spend a lot of effort creating a German voice track pretty much without exception probably is significant.
Germany is big enough, both population- and business-wise, to not have to lean nearly as much on English compared to smaller countries.
You also see this in book translations. Here in Denmark, the choice is sometimes rather limited (outside of bestsellers) and the translation quality suffers. Compare this to Germany, where the market is significantly larger, so more more and higher quality translations are available.
I'm Danish and my girlfriend is German, and I definitely notice the difference whenever I visit her family in Baden-Württemberg.
I also noticed it while I was studying. Technical documentation was usually only available in English and German. When you have a population of >80 million people, there is a large incentive for producing native language products.
As a consequence, a lot of Germans over a certain age simply do not speak English very well, or at all.
Norway is among exceptions (Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg), as far as I can tell, with a combined English literate population under that of say... Canada[0]. Most seem to (understandably) support their native language at the expense of English. Granted Germany, Austria, Poland, and Belgium all have relatively high English proficiency nonetheless, but it isn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as it is in Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Luxembourg.
Taking part in asynchronous internet discussions is wildly easier than any face to face communication. The blend of written, yet informal language used on the net makes it very easy to participate. In quality of writing, HN might be leaps and bounds above a random youtube comment thread, but that still does not make it particularly difficult.
Source: I feel quite at home commenting here, but I'm a mumbling wreckage when navigating the day to day linguistic perils of e.g. something as trivial as a US supermarket checkout.
> Source: I feel quite at home commenting here, but I'm a mumbling wreckage when navigating the day to day linguistic perils of e.g. something as trivial as a US supermarket checkout.
Yeah, I think that's a fairly common issue (overspecialization). I have that problem with studying Japanese: I get most of my practice in listening, so I can listen to and understand at a level far above my speaking, reading, or writing.
Exactly. That is kind of my point. Many europeans are able to participate in technical discussion in english even if our regular english is lacking. When I visited relatives in the US I noticed the problem that I could speak of computer science topics, history etc without problems, but struggled big time even naming the most basic food items. I knew what spam email was but was unaware that it was an actual food product until I visted wallmart and saw spam on the shelf which made laugh far more than perhaps such an observation reasonably warants.
I also can’t read a lot of regular prose very well. I can read any technical subject quite well though.
To be fair I was shocked when visiting the US how bad many Americans are at formulating themselves on paper.
> To be fair I was shocked when visiting the US how bad many Americans are at formulating themselves on paper.
The thing about English is that it's such a clusterfuck; slang, contractions, and "incorrect" grammar are hard to criticize when the language is already such a mess. Partly in jest, I liken it to a linguistic Broken Windows Theory[0].
I'm aware but if there were a central place then, as iamthirsty replied, English would most likely end up the default there. This was to help support k_ and eclectic's points.
Honestly, it might be interesting if there were a central, yet multilingual, place where tech-oriented Europeans could congregate just to see what would happen.
I think as a broad generalization over European populations, it's fairly accurate. Few people whose job does not require English proficiency are going to come anywhere close to fluency.
Of course the subset of the population that is likely to end up on "European Hacker News" would mostly consist of at least part-time English speakers. But then what is going to keep non-European English speakers out of that forum?
I don't think HN would look any different if it were hosted in Europe. Any website with mostly English content is going to be dominated by visitors from the US.
Yeah, Language is a point, Unlikely will researchers from other countries publish their papers in Chinese. it create barriers from both sides, both foreign products go into Chinese market or the other way around. However, if China can successfully innovate some great product/models, in consumer sector, it's not a big problem, look at Japan's past successes.
Secondly, the english block tends to have a similar legal and regulatory mindset in dealing with companies. The Chinese system seems opaque and hard to understand for outsiders and for good reason. There is a lot of government influence and thinking that shapes Chinese products which doesn't appear elsewhere. That is a huge disadvantage.
When you consider all the of the other issues a young company face, having a huge multi-national singular language and somewhat similar regulatory framework is helpful in getting started.