21 sats \ 14 replies \ @kr 21 Apr 2022 \ parent \ on: Daily discussion thread
What is the rationale for a Spanish sub?
There are no SN contributors who only communicate in Spanish, and the handful who know both English and Spanish will spend most of their time replicating the posts seen on the English sub with far fewer sats earned, fewer visits, & fewer comments. The lack of original content will dilute the SN platform and make newcomers feel like the whole platform is a ghost town. We're still fighting an uphill battle on the main sub to get consistent activity & engagement from users, and this feels like a major step back in that battle.
It's hard enough to bootstrap a community from scratch, and even harder if it's an identical community for people who happen to speak another language.
Why not just offer a "translate this post" button like on Twitter?
Spanish is the fourth most spoken language and has a half billion native speakers.
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How often do you visit websites that are in Spanish? Can't you just use translation? Of course, unless you are someone who speaks Spanish, you make ~0 visits to websites in Spanish.
Now flip that around. With someone who speaks only Spanish (or prefers to read in Spanish over English, or who cannot read English very well if at all) how often are they then on English-only websites? As infrequently as they can.
That helps to explain why SN has few visits from Spanish speaking regions:
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I'm not doubting the popularity of the Spanish language.
Rather than spinning up 10 different subs for all the top 10 languages with all the same content replicated on each one, wouldn't user profile language filters be a more elegant solution for everyone?
This way the main board doesn't get fragmented, and each user would only see content from the language(s) they select. Great idea from @nout imo.
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oh, I like this very much sir, great idea
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A couple times a week users post content in Spanish and I've had 3 Spanish speakers ask recently which is a small absolute number but for a request count is quite high. I expect Latin American Bitcoiners to grow fast too.
I also thought there were more Spanish speakers on here than there are. Looking at the analytics though, only 6% of users are from Spanish speaking countries.
Good point on translation, but I still doubt it's as good as giving other language speakers their own space. Probably too early.
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How much activity does the r/Bitcoin board get in comparison to the Spanish version of r/Bitcoin? Does a board like that even exist on Reddit?
Language has a super strong network effect and I think you'll find that non-English speakers would rather use a translation app to contribute to a board with 10-100x more activity on it than try to spin up a new board in their native language from scratch.
Agree that people should be able to make their own space for whatever they want, I think the monthly crowdfunding idea you mentioned above is a great way to accomplish that.
It will let anyone show SN exactly what topics they really care about, rather than SN trying to predict which use cases might be worth pursuing.
In fact, why not just implement that monthly crowdfunding feature right away? A minimum monthly contribution of 100,000 sats would be a reasonably high bar to start (maybe lower it over time), and it would let the communities start to form on their own while sending far more sats back to active users each day.
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All for the monthly crowdfunding feature. Put me down for 100K sats per month for a Spanish sub. My take is that Latin America and Africa are going to see the largest growth in everyday Lightning usage over the near term. N.B. I read Spanish fluently, but am a non-native speaker.
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afaik it doesn't exist. Good point on language network effect.
In fact, why not just implement that monthly crowdfunding feature right away?
It feels too early to me. Plus, there's a lot to figure out wrt how these should work in detail.
... SN trying to predict which use cases might be worth pursuing.
This is why I'm thinking aloud on this all over the place.
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Makes sense, part of me thinks it's too early to introduce new subs at all. And yeah, lots of implications to consider for crowdfunding new subs.
When the time is right, I think it will save you a lot of thinking, time, and effort to just let users make the new sub decisions for you. Lightning payments can be a useful quality filter that sites like Reddit can't offer.
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As a non-native-english person: we have big communities outside of the usual stuff that people in the US know about. This is mainly because when you are default English, the apps won't suggest to you anything in a different language (even when there is a huge amount of content).
For example if you set your language to non-english on Twitter, you will only get content and posts in that language, there are famous people, influencers, memers, podcasts, the whole deal. There are also social networks that are not at all used in the US...
I'd say like 80% of people don't feel comfortable contributing in English and in some countries it's actually frown upon to talk in English (maybe surprisingly, but France is an example...). And this is actually including people in tech...
I like the idea of introducing a bar with sats :)
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Interesting perspective, a language filter on SN could probably accomplish something similar to what Twitter has... users could set default languages in their profile & only ever see posts in the languages they select... without needing to create entirely new subs for each specific language
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Btw, the one interesting aspect that I just realized is that the non-english podcasters, authors, etc are often doing the work of bringing the English content into their own language. Since majority of the dev in Bitcoin (and generally) happens in English, this means that the non-english authors are doing the job of filtering the content and finding the most interesting pieces.
So this then results in overall higher quality content in non-english in comparison to English. There is less noise, less manipulation, less content with agenda that tries to sell something to you. Also all major tech News webs have agreement with the companies to not leak info early - so the non-english sources tend to have more details earlier... I wonder if this is just my experience though. So while I'm fully capable of reading the English content, sometimes I just get more from my language content...
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Do you want Spanish speakers who prefer content in Spanish to go elsewhere, or do you want to give them a space to participate and learn what value4value is by participating, something they can't do on Reddit, HN, Lobst.rs, FB, Whatsapp, etc.
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I think anyone who speaks any language should be free to either:
a) use the stacker news subs that are available
b) create their own stacker news subs
c) or use another platform
I'm not advocating for shutting anyone out of the platform, I'm saying that the users should be the ones to show their desire for new subs (probably by crowd-funding sats), rather than Stacker News guessing at which subs people might want next.
Personally, I'm bearish on language-related subs getting traction, but any user should be able to set up their own sub with a few sats if they want and give it a shot.
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