Why are all non-English submissions flagged?

Dang has mentioned quite often that the submissions should be in English, most recently 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.

How 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.

This 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?

Back 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?

I 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 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 links in Arabic to a jobs site. Very off-topic.

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 . 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 which often links to a blogger entries with titles in Turkish like "Learn English Without Taking a Course".

Then link to a translated version so that everybody can actually read it and not just a small subset of users.

Anecdotally, a very high percentage of non-English submissions are spam, scams, or self-promotion.

I 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.

Presumably because HN is an English speaking site?

Well 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.

I guess because most people come to hn are expecting to see stories mostly in English regardless of their nationalities.

why are most content-based community websites (or most websites really) single language?

በቀላሉ ብዙ ሰዎች ስለማይረዱ።

You can submit a link to Google translate.