I’ve seen posts online or memes about it, mainly discussing American people who think the internet as a whole is US-centric despite the topic at hand taking place in another country (nothing to do with America), for example: someone wrote the date format as 30/10/2020 (using the EU format) but some American was like “THE CORRECT WAY IS 10/30/2020” when they fail to realize that user is not American at all.
Is US defaultism real when they travel abroad? They assume the $ is legal tender worldwide in countries where their own currency is used more (the only thing that’ll work is exchanging it but not for direct transactions). I’ve heard an American woman went on a tirade whilst in France as the cashier refused a $20 bill when the prices are in EUROS (WTF?) or being like “SPEAK ENGLISH!” in non-English speaking countries.
I’ve always felt like as long as you’re in English speaking places in the web, you’ll get mostly Americans anyway as they have the largest English speaking population.
Like when I see family members or friends with a different native language online, they are always usually following people and pages in their own language.
Nobody defaults to Americanism in Arabic spaces for example.
So there will always be a majority of Americans on English language websites, and that’s why it always be American centric.
The US invented the internet (and the UK invented the world wide web), so English is the lingua franca of the internet for better or worse. Most people on the internet who speak English as a first language are from the US, and with the algorithmic nature of most of our online interactions being borderless, people in the US get fed non-US content all the time. If there’s not anything obvious signifying that they are seeing content from another country, confirmation bias will lead them to think it is US-relevant content.
I will say, on the money thing, there are a lot of countries that use USD from an official (or unofficial) capacity. The US is also pretty cashless at this point, so it’s possible that people have used their card overseas no problem, and not realized that their bank was doing an exchange in the background. Then they get to somewhere cash-only that doesnt also take USD, and suddenly experience their money is not good. Still stupid to be a dick about it when it’s your own fault, but idiots all around the world respond poorly when subject the the consequences of their own mistakes.
On the other hand if you say you prefer inches to centimeters you’ll get piled on. I’m Canadian btw but inches suit my needs.
If only they’d have made a metre equal a yard…
-thanks for proving my point lemmy.
If 1 meter = 1 yard, inches would still not exist in this metric system. Every individual imperial unit is fine. Inches are fine. Yards are fine. Gallons are fine. But the ratio between inches and yards is not. The ratio of cubic yards to gallons is insane.
Even if one metric unit would exactly equal an imperial unit, the systems would still be incompatible. Metric is not superior because of how “big” each individual unit is, but because it is a coherent system. The only conversions between units are by factors of 10 (except for units of time but I think that’s the only measurement the whole world agrees on). You never need to learn a conversion rate with an arbitrary factor like in the imperial system.
This exactly proves my point again. I like imperial. I like factors of 8 and 12. I don’t want factors of 10, in my occupation in a cut/sew shop I don’t find it as useful.
If a metre was a yard we could talk between the systems. We could use the preffered system for the application. If someone said 2.5 meters, because I know my twelve times table, I would understand instantly that it’s 90" or 7 1/2 feet. I honestly have no clue how many feet are in a mile, I use kilometers for that.
What volume does one pound of water have? How long are the sides of a cube of that volume? How much energy do you need to raise a one pound object up by one yard?
In the respective metric units the answer to these conversions is either 1 or a factor of 10
How many of those conversions are a factor of 8 or 12?
Metric is a lot more then just meters and centimeters and all of those conversions make sense
That is all information I don’t need in my day to day existence, you missed the part about cut/sew I guess. If I did need it I’d use metric because it’s good for that. For my needs measuring things on the table or around the house inches work better for me. My point was if there was a common reference between systems we could speak between them, but my original point was that if you say you like inches around here you’ll never hear the end of it from lemmy. QED.
Know what a country code top level domain is?
Ever notice anything about American URLs compared to URLs from other countries?
Someone from the states told me that canada needs its own banking system urgently because of trump tarrifs. Comrade, we were able to pay at stores directly from our bank accounts decades before you could (i.e., it was instant, no pending debit transactions).
I think that was me. I’m Indian, but I was talking based on what I knew about the US banking system and assuming it would be similar for Canada.
i’m not from the US and i feel it all the time here on the threadiverse. in most cases i don’t feel there is any malicious intent so i don’t nitpick(?) about it though
I feel it whenever the discussion on football comes up. They get so fucking triggered when we call football football and not soccer. Even more when we correct them when they mistakenly call it soccer. Then they pull out their go-to cope about britain calling it soccer back in the jurassic period and I’m over here like: okay, but britain is one small country and the world is vast and literally everywhere else, we call it football. They always get so fucking triggered.
That and the gun control debate makes Americans go completely apeshit.
i fucking hate this so much. i’ve heard that brits started calling futbol football instead of soccer because of like a disdain against usonians, although unsure how true that is, lol.
I heard the opposite, that they supposedly began calling it soccer as a posh thing but every brit I know of, calls it football. Personally, I don’t care how it happened, I just find it weird how americans seem to cling to the word soccer and bring up goofy ancient history between them and britain as a defence. I have taken to calling their game, American rugby and will continue to do so for as long as they call football, soccer.
I notice this often in comments of political topics. Even if not involving the US, positions are often labeled very bipolar, e.g. as “liberal” or “conservative”. But they don’t seem to realize that those terms describe totally different political standpoints in different countries. Not sure tho if this bipolar thinking can be considered US-centric or if it’s just how they are raised to think.
I had something similar recently. Someone made a comment reply to me referencing “triggering the libs” and I had to stop and think because it didn’t make sense out of US politics context.
(By the way, what I wrote below I mean this in the nicest way. I reread it and it’s sounds assholish but that’s not what I’m going for.)
For the US inclined, “the libs” who are the “woke mob” in the USA are THE RIGHT WING in Aus. So… when you say “triggering the libs”… like annoying the Nazis? Oooohh, you mean like annoying the left of politics, Roger!
I see it all the time even here on Lemmy. Americans love to wade into international communities and act like the US perspective always applies.
A recent example would be a discussion in a UK community about upgrading ANPR cameras to catch ghost plates, but a couple of yanks decided to pop in and get angry about Flock cameras, despite the fact that ANPR tech has been around without controversy for decades here.
It’s not ALL Americans, obviously, but it’s enough of them that it’s a known issue.
I tried to change pounds to dollars in Florida in the 1990s. The lady read the conversion details backwards (it was probably 1.25 dollars to the pound at the time) and gave me the opposite ratio (works out at 0.80).
When I pointed out the error, she said “The US dollar is the strongest currency in the world, sir! It’s always point-something” and refused to believe me.
This was at a bank. The manager had to be called. Neither of them were happy to discover the truth and both resented having to eventually give me the correct exchange!
This confirms the other stereotype, that they’re a country of morons
