I’ve been using Google and web services in English for about a decade now. At first, I used .fr instead of .com because I’m French but as I couldn’t find information in French and that I’m relentlessly using an online dictionary when I don’t understand a word, I quickly switched to .com/English.
No way to stay in a French online world and fight to find stuff. And in my domains, everything’s in English.
Fast forward a decade.
The French web is… I don’t know what to say. My parents always complain not finding anything on it but discussions going nowhere on boards. I’m not surprised. Some English Wikipedia pages simply have the quadruple or more in terms of quality and quantity, even on French-only things sometimes. You just have to compare Amazon.com and Amazon.fr, the latter is so terrible: no comments or useless ones (“this thing is a piece of shit!” thanks for the info bro), no ratings, bad search, bad sellers… When you are French, you wonder how this company could be that big. And then you have the original one, the .com where even the most obscure music album CD has a 20 lines review, where you have insane deals and where if you’re not happy, they come over your place to take your package back and drop a new one (on Amazon.fr, you have to drop the package somewhere at a post office).
It’s just another world. No wonder my parents generation doesn’t think the internet is that great, they just get pop-ups in the face and terrible websites with fucking roll-over menus and no valuable information in 2012.
The US took over. Popular French websites are US websites with .fr at the end; we have slate.fr, huffingtonpost.fr etc The last one I saw is a copy/paste of 9gag.com called… 9blague.com. Of course, all the US internet memes are translated in French with more or less success, especially less. Oh, the cringing.
As I see things three or four times -once or twice through my US network and same with my French peeps- it creates so much noise in my mind and shows me how pyramidal France is about web culture: a couple of people on top, in Paris, translating American humor and a lot of people writing Frenglish comments they translate from Reddit and then you have a huge amount of people reading articles with sources coming 99% of the time from the US. I just resumed the French internet culture.
At the same time we have great, fast, reliable and cheap internet connections there. It’s super weird.