Comment Re:Hello? I'm from Europe? (Score 1) 20
How do you know it's not an American spoofing a European spoofing an American?
I will admit that I have occasionally been mildly annoyed that I couldn't use actual Greek characters when discussing things like etymology and math on here. But given how bad the Spam problem is already, do I want all discussions to get buried under a huge pile of hanzi and emoji and whatnot? No, I do not. I've seen what that did to Usenet, and I am not keen on it.
Slashdot walks a fine line. It has never attempted to gate itself behind geolocation checks, for example. But the site has consistently refused to make any changes specifically to accommodate foreigners. It's an American site, that is open to the public, so others *can* choose to participate, if they want to, but they're choosing to participate (or not, as the case may be) in an American site.
Do Americans go onto French discussion boards and complain that all the conversations are in French, that everything is discussed from a French perspective, and so on, and ask for that to be changed? (I almost asserted that we don't, but then I remembered that there are over 300 million of us, and I don't frequent French discussion fora, so who knows, maybe it does actually happen and I'm simply unaware of it. There are, after all, idiots in every country.)
I will admit that I have occasionally been mildly annoyed that I couldn't use actual Greek characters when discussing things like etymology and math on here. But given how bad the Spam problem is already, do I want all discussions to get buried under a huge pile of hanzi and emoji and whatnot? No, I do not. I've seen what that did to Usenet, and I am not keen on it.
Slashdot walks a fine line. It has never attempted to gate itself behind geolocation checks, for example. But the site has consistently refused to make any changes specifically to accommodate foreigners. It's an American site, that is open to the public, so others *can* choose to participate, if they want to, but they're choosing to participate (or not, as the case may be) in an American site.
Do Americans go onto French discussion boards and complain that all the conversations are in French, that everything is discussed from a French perspective, and so on, and ask for that to be changed? (I almost asserted that we don't, but then I remembered that there are over 300 million of us, and I don't frequent French discussion fora, so who knows, maybe it does actually happen and I'm simply unaware of it. There are, after all, idiots in every country.)