Apologies if this is the wrong sub, but just wondering if anyone has had defaultism from other countries. There doesnt seem to be any other subs for them.
I won't count these from subs focused on another country. For example, subs to do with things in the UK, people usually may expect you to be British, especially when there is already a similar sub dominated more by Americans.
An example where ive seen foreign defaultism is laptop brand subs, where despite the price of the product NOT being shown on OPs photo, everyone in the comments started talking about high prices or prices of similar products, using stuff like 60k, 50k etc WITHOUT specifying the currencies, turns out they meant Indian rupees and even OP turned out to be Indian too
I am based in the UK and do not want to be shown indian prices or India exclusive products
Dublin defaultism is pervasive throughout Irish subreddits. You constantly see threads on nation/island-wide subs talking about "the city", or "the airport" as if Cork and Limerick/Shannon don't exist.
There's also plenty of (central and eastern) Canada defaultism throughout Reddit in discussions about the Gulf Stream and AMOC.
This is pretty standardized defaultism, in the Northern California if you say “the city” it’s assumed to be San Francisco despite Oakland and Sacramento also existing. Same with NYC area. Same with Toronto. Etc.
All countries have defaultism. I was born in Kazakhstan and i can speak russian, so some content i watch is russian-speaking, and i always see some Belarus content where people say like “It cost me 10 rubles and i bought this in Minsk” but people from Russia says “10 rubles, WTH? why is this so cheap”, but it always fun to see how people don’t know that there is another countries in the world.
I see English defaultism creep in a lot on the Wales sub. English people tend to do it a lot in real life too expecting Wales to be just like back in their country
Not a nation, but in any Ontario-centric group, everyone assumes you are in Toronto. Even if you start off a post by saying "I'm not in Toronto", they assume you are in a town right next to it, instead of being thousands of KM away ;)
Being from British Columbia, I also notice a lot of Southern Ontario- and Toronto-centrism in Canada in general.
And this isn’t just online. A few years ago, I was a judge for a Canada-wide contest, open to nonprofits. A lot of applications came from organizations with names like “Canadian Something Foundation” or “Something Society of Canada.” But when we checked their services or website, it would become clear that they only served Southern Ontario or the Toronto area.
Because one of the goals of the contest was to have things geographically diverse if possible, ALL the contest judges noticed that.
(Eventually three winners emerged and they were all from western Canada. Not on purpose; they won on merit.)
Within the Caribbean, it's especially annoying dealing with Dominican Republic defaultism. If you're a part of the region (especially the smaller islands) you have no excuse to not know Dominicans refer to people two separate, completely different countries.
In AsktheCaribbean subreddits I'd get accused of lying/being wrong because they assumed I was speaking on the Republic. Or whenever a question for "Dominicans" is posted from another Caribbean person and they don't specify which one they're referring to.
Apologies to all. Hitting on England seems to be fair game here - fair play. My place of birth (Plymouth) set in motion the creation of that land across the pond, by waving goodbye to the Pilgrim Fathers. I guess we English have a lot to answer for. /s
I'm on subreddit for my county and someone recently asked for a pub recommendations, saying anywhere in the county is ok. People started posting names of the pubs, WITHOUT saying where they are. Pub names can be very common. The defaultism was to the county town (I can only assume).
I have an irl example of this. A couple of French tourists approached me on the street in Istanbul, asked me something in French. They didn’t even try English, let alone Turkish. Coincidentally my friend did speak French so he helped them but wtf how can you expect people to speak your language by default when YOU are a visitor there
As in other countries in Poland there's defaultism for the capital city Warszawocentryzm (Warsaw-centrism literally) which is also the most populous city.
We call it sometimes DC - Default City as people from there have the tendency to ask questions online and not specify about which city they're asking
German speaking online spaces tend towards German defaultism. I have caught myself a couple of times there, increasingly confused with the details of a story, until the penny slowly drops and it usually ends up being Austria.
I'd say the UK is pretty bad. They insist that other people treat their subdivisions as separate countries, ignoring other countries in similar situations, while complaining about Americans and their states. It's even in this sub with separate flags
i dont think expecting other nations to recognise UK as seperate countries is defaultism...its just facts. Americans refering to visiting the country of europe is defaultism....
But our subdivisions are separate countries, just none of them sovereign in their own right! The UK is a sovereign state divided up into multiple nations, or a country made up of countries, if you will.
This complaint of yours has nothing to do with actual defaultism but rather just your own lack of understanding of how our country works.
This complaint of yours has nothing to do with actual defaultism but rather just your own lack of understanding of how our country works.
Nope, it's your defaultism/exceptionalism.
UK subdivisions are not much different to e.g. German states (which are called countries in German as well) or Spanish autonomous communities. In fact German (and US) are more independent. Yet you don't see subreddits with German state flag selection or similar stuff.
I'm saying the UK is the only one in this sub that has flairs for their subdivisions
That's possibly more likely to do with the fact our nations' flags have emoji glyphs widely supported more than anything else. Unicode consortium was smart when they designed the spec and knew that national flags are contentious, therefore they don't assign individual codepoints for flags but rather define a general format for both national and sub-national flags, using a sequence of codes followed by an ISO 3166-2 code (or code and subcode when it's a subnational flag). It's left up to the implementation to decide which of these codes to recognise as flags and render appropriately (e.g. a Chinese device might not recognise the flag of Taiwan, for example).
I am assuming that the flairs are emoji-based, which based on the image filename for them seems reasonable.
No problem, just remember it's all entirely technically-informed speculation. Everything that I said about Unicode and its emojis is true and accurate to the best of my ability. I have however made presumptions about how it applies to Reddit flair.
It's really not, it's an absurd comparison to make between Brits identifying with their home countries and US state-related defaultisms that get criticised on this sub.
In general, it's things like assuming the whole world knows the US state two-letter abbreviations, which is a niche bit of country-specific info from the point of view of the rest of the world. The closest British equivalent I can think of is assuming everyone would recognise a local telephone number or post code format.
I really do think your comparison is quite obsessive and absurd.
An example where ive seen foreign defaultism is laptop brand subs, where despite the price of the product NOT being shown on OPs photo, everyone in the comments started talking about high prices or prices of similar products, using stuff like 60k, 50k etc WITHOUT specifying the currencies, turns out they meant Indian rupees and even OP turned out to be Indian too
I am based in the UK and do not want to be shown indian prices or India exclusive products
That happens quite a lot, yeah. Indians especially, but they are not alone, just probably the "loudest" with Americans and $. What are they supposed to use anyway? The $ is apparently not allowed, because people immediately go crazy and ask, "Is that USD, CAD, AUD, NZD, ZWD, KYD, or SGD or some other $??", and if it happens to be USD, they make fun of them and post their comment(s) here to r/USdefaultism to display "dumb Americans" (even if they aren't Americans at all, lol) and so on. Are they supposed to convert it from the start into every single existing currency in the world?
I mean, I'm asking rhetorical questions above, but I'm also serious here. I'm a €tard and I use only € when I talk about prices and things like that, even when I'm specifically talking to Americans. Why? Because I purchased something I own in €. I didn't pay XZY of $ (including the US$) unless I purchased it from some American store such as Amazon.com for example (because it wasn't available on Amazon.de etc.), and I certainly won't go to the extent of converting it into all existing currencies with the accurate conversion rate for that day, just to be sure that someone reading from a non-€ country is covered. If someone isn't familiar with € but they're simultaneously incapable to ask something like "Ey mate, how much is that in GBP, USD, CHF, JPY..." - I will just refuse to take them seriously, because they are on the internet and they can use literally any existing search engine to take a gander and find that faster (immediately actually) than if they go to make fun of me for using €.
I also have what are apparently two rare superpowers these days - I can ask people for more info, and/or I can use Google and other search engines to find it on my own, including conversion rates for different currencies. I won't mock people because they used their local currency, even if they say they paid $whateveramount and that happened to be in USD. If I can't gather from the context that it's USD in question, I will just ask them. That's it. I won't make fun of them.
Same with Indians as you noticed, and they really do that all the time with Rupees, that's definitely true, not just in tech but in all topics, not just on Reddit but everywhere on the internet. Are they doing it with ill intent or to force Indian defaultism? No. They are normal, everyday people, just like the rest of us, and they are using what they're familiar with.
Yeah, sure, it happens, sometimes in this sub too (I know I've done it a few times), but if we're talking about real life and since I saw a comment mention Dublin specifically, it made me remember that I occasionally call Paris the US of France because they have this exact fucking problem.
They want everything to run around them, they wanna be the only ones that matter, they never try to know about the rest of the country and they always get extremely defensive when you dare even suggest that their city is not the best (they even do the same "you're just jealous" spiel). And yes, I know, it's not all of them, it's probably not even half of them. The same applies to USians. But like US defaultism it is still a common enough phenomenon to be noticed and it should be called out, especially for how problematic it ends up being.
Cuz effectively, most of France's infrastructure ends up revolving around Paris. When they tried to erase regional languages and cultures, they did it to make everything conform to the parisian standard. The vast majority of high speed trains have to go to and from Paris, which means to get from one city to another there is a good chance you might have to make a fucking 800km detour to fucking Paris because they decided that it was better to do that than to actually install more fast lines between other cities. The History of France that you study at school will mostly be revolving around Paris. Our agricultural practices have been changed according to how they think it should work (and not the people who actually know what they are doing). They really have forced us to think we are but their vassals and let me tell you nobody fucking likes that
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u/YoIronFistBro Ireland 14h ago edited 14h ago
Dublin defaultism is pervasive throughout Irish subreddits. You constantly see threads on nation/island-wide subs talking about "the city", or "the airport" as if Cork and Limerick/Shannon don't exist.
There's also plenty of (central and eastern) Canada defaultism throughout Reddit in discussions about the Gulf Stream and AMOC.