Reddit is on top of everybody’s search results nowadays.

Yet it’s still mostly an English-language tool and the audience is largely American.

The world is not just English-speaking though!

The Internet has also other options in different languages.

The more adventurous or multilingual among you already know that.

Here are some successful international social news communities similar to Reddit for other languages.

What is social news? How do news communities work?

You may wonder what social news are and how Reddit and other (international) news communities work.

It’s simple really. Someone shares a link to a news item. Others vote it up.

The news items with the most votes get featured on top/the frontpage.

This is how the social news model still inherently works despite algorithms all over the social Web.

So you harness the proverbial “wisdom of crowds” to sift through the noise of the Web and to find the rare signal.

It works sometimes. Sometimes it does not. Yet it’s a good start.

This way you don’t get inundated by the sheer amount of items.

Often you will spot news that are underrepresented, more important or covering less prominent topics.

Some of the points of view may be also differing from the mainstream news sites.

Reddit also works for questions and discussions. Outbound links are rather the exception by now.

The Reddit model

Reddit wasn’t the number one social news back in the day.

It was competing for attention with its initially more popular competitor Digg.

Yet Digg degenerated over the years — partly due to the questionable character of its founder and CEO.

Reddit in contrast evolved and expanded.

First off Reddit’s unique feature was the vote down button.

Like Digg and other social news communities it had a vote up feature.

Yet both up and down are closely displayed on Reddit.

On Digg you could bury a post but that was a separate and somewhat shamefully hidden feature.

Also another unique feature of Reddit are the subreddits called specific communities for all kinds of topics.

There are millions of those by now and more than a hundred thousand ones are active.

So by now Reddit is less about one size fits all social news. It’s more a platform for niche communities on a vast amount of topics.

Since late 2024 Reddit also offers automated localization and translation for 35 languages.

 

The democratic Web internationally

What about democratic social news around in the world?

Are there sites like Reddit n other countries as well?

Yes, I discovered some social news communities from all over the world. Yet many did not work for long. They lacked critical mass.

You need an actual crowd for wisdom of crowds.

Without significant audiences the bias grows exponentially while the quality of shares diminishes steadily.

As I live in Germany I always looked out for and contributed to local social news communities here. Yet they all failed.

I looked further to other countries.

Then I collected some of the best international social news community sites from all over the world:

menéame – Most renowned social news site in Spanish.

The Spain based meneame.net is a general interest social news community.

It stayed true to the crowd curated frontpage news model of the early Web 2.0 days. It’s called “edición general” by now.

And it worked. It stayed active for many years. Ever time I look it up there is a lot of voting and commenting activity.

While Spanish is spoken all over South America it focuses mainly on news and sources from Spain it seems.

Like Reddit there are some other topic based communities by now.

When you check the list you notice that they are relatively small.

After clicking you don’t see much engagement either.

One reason for the lack of audiences my be that they are hidden behind a “hamburger menu” at the top right corner.

Wykop.pl – Polish social news community

Wykop copied the Digg model of social news. Even the name is a direct translation.

Digg ceased to exist long ago yet wykop.pl still thrives.

That’s surprising given the relative small potential audience it has.

There are no more than 50 million Polish-speakers around the world (I’m one).

So why did Wykop succeed in the long run? Hard to say!

Initially there was not much of social media in Poland. So people would probably convene there.

Then a Polish Facebook version called Nasza Klasa took care of social networking.

The Wykop site had a lot of issues of right-wing propaganda spread there. Nonetheless it looks relatively clean by now.

Balatarin.com – Iranian social news community site

When this blog here started with great fanfare my posts got translated into multiple languages!

Many people all over the world shared them!

One of the more exotic languages that it got translated into was Farsi or Persian (that is spoken in Iran).

Iranian Balatarin users flocked to this blog and I even dedicated a post to my audience of Iranians.

That’s how I discovered Balatarin. I want popular there.

The site looks almost exactly the same as back when I initially found it. Like Reddit it has a vote up and down feature.

It also seems to be a one-size-fits all general interest news community like in the early days.

The social news site is dominated by just a few sources it seems. Iranwire is on the frontpage with several at once as of writing this.

Rating criteria

How did I rate them? I looked at

• the content
• the atmosphere
• the user base
• and the features.

You might ask yourself “how can I use social news without speaking all those languages?”

These sites still thrive after decades!

They have lively communities that sift through news.

 

Do you speak Spanish, Polish or Farsi?

Well, OK, I speak Polish as my mother tongue (I am born in Poland).

I understand some Spanish (learned it in school for several years but forgot almost all of it).

Additionally many English speaking people flocked here from Iran’s Balatarin so I did not have to speak Farsi.

There are some English submissions on those news sites.

Also Google Translate and many other often AI based tools help you with understanding.

Pictures and brand names are the same everywhere so it does not matter in which language you find them.

 

What about India, China, Russia, Germany?

As you see some countries and/or languages are missing.

I especially am disappointed not to have found a really good Indian social news site.

They were many but none was really impressing.

The same applies to China. No thriving news community there!

I wasn’t even able to find a Russian social news site! at all.

Plus I’m also still looking one in Arabic. Yet I can’t read neither language.

So please help and add it in the comments if you know one.

I did not add a German social news site to the list. Why? None was able to create and maintain a healthy community.