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Ask HN: Why are all non-English submissions flagged?
For most people in the world, English is not their native language. Some articles, that contain interesting information, are only available in a different language. Yet, these articles are dead on arrival.
- dcminter 5y agoThis isn't rocket science. HN is a website set up by English speakers and naturally therefore has a primarily English speaking readership. Any article not in English will only be of interest to a tiny minority of that audience. So let me ask you, in turn, why you expect HN as a whole to be interested in non-English-language articles?
- usr1106 5y agoI guess primarily you should engage with local communities for that purpose. At least in the past there were submissions via Google translate I believe to remember. If the article is particularly interesting that might be an option. I have no experience whether is still works.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoThen link to a translated version so that everybody can actually read it and not just a small subset of users.
- nobody0 5y agoI guess because most people come to hn are expecting to see stories mostly in English regardless of their nationalities.
- qeternity 5y agoPresumably because HN is an English speaking site?
- ndkwj 5y agoYou can submit a link to Google translate.
- leoedin 5y agoBack when I ran a fairly large forum we had to ban non-English content simply because we couldn't understand it, and so couldn't moderate it. I'm guessing that's a big part of it - How do the HN moderators distinguish the credibility of a non-English news source? How can they determine if it's flame bait? How can they determine if it's legal or not?
- eesmith 5y agoIf I see a submission in a foreign language, I'll paste it into Google Translate and flag if obviously off-topic. Most of the non-English links I've checked are obviously off-topic, like "how to find a dentist in <city>".
- Causality1 5y agoAnecdotally, a very high percentage of non-English submissions are spam, scams, or self-promotion.
- uCantCauseUCant 5y agoIt is difficult for non-fluent moderation to judge the values of these articles- and thus to prevent HN to be app-used as a non-English article accelerator, the policy is to murder all articles without english translation.
- Pick-A-Hill2019 5y agoHow do you propose HN's anti-spam filters and Mod(s) check submissions? While I take your implied point about inclusiveness how many different languages do you expect the spam filters and Mods to be fluent in? One? Two? More? That opens you up to “What-About-ism” In my opinion there is nothing wrong with a website starting up (and keeping topics and discussions) to their lingua franca. As a neutral-ish example – What if I went to a .ru forum and posted something Swahili? Chances are high that it would be flagged/deleted because Swahili is not a language they speak (the mods) and so they have no way of checking to see if it is a Viagra spam or a meaningful contribution.
- _Algernon_ 5y agoMost browsers (i.e. all that are based on chromium) have integrated google translate allowing for automatic translation of websites, so no mod would have to learn the languages to filter out spam.
- ksaj 5y agoI'm not picking sides, but the same argument could be made for posting the link through Google Translate so that it appears English on HN. That way dang et al don't have to do it themselves in order to moderate.
- Causality1 5y agoYeah, somewhere around the point HN became fifty percent submissions in languages I don't speak is the point where I would stop visiting at all. I'm not going to sort through all that looking for things I'll enjoy reading.
- eesmith 5y agoI am not able to reproduce your observation, but I have only limited data. Could you give some more concrete examples of submissions that shouldn't have been flagged/killed? Many of the times that I see a non-English link, it's spam, including completely non-HN-related links. I went through the last ~25 hours of postings (with showdead enabled) to find foreign language links. What I found was that the dead links were to off-topic pages. Of the two non-dead pages, one in Spanish is mostly off-topic, and one in French is on-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=noakmilo https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=noakmilo has a couple in Spanish. It appears to be promoting their tech news site that isn't HN-related. Eg, "how to get a GMail account (as explained by NASA)." (That one wasn't dead.) https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zmzm92 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zmzm92 links in Arabic to a jobs site. Very off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=revistacomebien https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=revistacomebien posted two links in Spanish, including "Protein shakes that you should prepare for training". Off-topic. anton96 posted the on-topic «Unix à jamais: nouvelle série en cours sur le Club iGen» at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078209 . gus_massa advised in the sole comment: 'post in other languages are usually ignored or flagged unless there is no equivalent information in English. At least translate the title to something like "Unix Forever: New Series Underway on Club iGen [in French]".' I stopped at slightly more than 24 hours ago with a link by https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=elizehurley https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=elizehurley which often links to a blogger entries with titles in Turkish like "Learn English Without Taking a Course".
- dcminter 5y agoTerrific! I will note that after a while it must become self selecting though. If foreign language submissions never make it to the front page, eventually it will be rare that anyone bothers to submit the good stuff. Meanwhile the spammers will continue their attempts as usual.
- aaron695 5y agoSeems true they are flagged - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=translate.google.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=translate.google.com This ones pretty interesting and flagged for instance, Western media didn't pick up the story so that's a loss to the community if they liked it - Google project loon balloon fall in Brazil - https://g1.globo.com/to/tocantins/noticia/2021/03/02/balao-com-equipamentos-tecnologicos-fica-pendurado-em-arvore-apos-cair-no-jalapao.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/to/tocantins/noticia/2021/03/02/balao-c... Quite disconcerting many commentators here seem to not be able to use Google Translate or know of it's existence.
- jsnell 5y agoDang has mentioned quite often that the submissions should be in English, most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571809. If a submission in another language gains traction, it'll generally get changed to an English-language source instead, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27922560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27922560.
- Proven 5y agoGood question. I think they should be outright rejected, rather than flagged.
- nsonha 5y agowhy are most content-based community websites (or most websites really) single language?
- krapp 5y agoThey're created by someone and written in their native language, which in turn attracts a community that can communicate in that language.
- nsonha 5y agowhy are most English websites English only? They are all created by the Brit?
- compressedgas 5y agoBecause most of the native English speakers are monolingual.
- nsonha 5y agowhat point are you tring to make? Because mine is that it has nothing to do with "native". There are more English speakers, native and non-native, who are multilingual than speakers of any other language, yet they chose to make content in English, instead of multilingual to reach a wider audience.
- runawaybottle 5y agoWell there you go ladies and gentlemen, we are prepared to debate anything on HN, even whether we should allow non-english articles. Bro, most of us can’t read other languages. But for fun, given how no one really reads the articles, if the submitter translates it and summarized the gist, I think HN would oblige with a discussion. It wouldn’t be so bad so long as the these articles bring an entirely different experience from some place else in the world. But I don’t need to read the same trite stuff in another language, there’s plenty in English.
- tga 5y agoበቀላሉ ብዙ ሰዎች ስለማይረዱ።