International Social News Communities like Reddit

I don’t use English social news sites like Reddit for a plethora of reasons.

It’s not that I dislike the democratic model of voting content up. It’s just that

Reddit and its audience is quite often obnoxious.

The world is not just English-speaking though!

The Internet has lots and lots of other options in different languages.

The more adventurous or multilingual among you already know that.


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 underreported, more important or covering less prominent topics.

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

 

The democratic Web internationally

To prove that I love democratic social news I looked around in the world!

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

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 always also English submissions on those news sites.

Also the other sites you land on often have English sections.

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.

 

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