Funny story about that. We (reddit) had a long debate about what the default UI and content should be back when we internationalized (2008 I think?). Should we use the Accept-Language header to select both the UI and the content, or just the UI? We started by making the assumption that if your preferred language was French, for example, you'd want French content.

We got a ton of feedback from French speakers that they preferred the English content, so we ended up settling on selecting a UI based on the A-L header but giving the default English content (unless you specifically set it otherwise).

That's interesting. I think your decision makes sense, since your french users all speak English and you have much more content in English. In fact it personally irks me when I see reddit's UI in French (for example when I'm not logged in) because I'd rather have the whole site in English than parts of it in French.

In any case I think that if you really wanted to target the French-speaking population, it would be best to have a separate site or at least a clearly separated part of the site.

There is a separate part of the site for French speakers:

http://www.reddit.com/r/fr

There's one for every supported language.

If it's user-created content, then it has a serious network effect - for the smaller communities, they will often prefer larger(=~better) english content to a smaller pool of their local content.

It would be a different story if the content available was comparable, but it usually isn't.

Just to give you an idea of how underserved the French market is, here's the closest French equivalent I've found to Hacker News: http://news.humancoders.com/ On a busy day, front-page stories get maybe 2 or 4 upvotes. If there's anything better out there, I haven't found it.

The French consumer market has tons of holes like this. And we're talking about a huge, wealthy market with plenty of mobile devices and solid broadband. It's not a wide-open market, but there are tons of opportunities.

I'm hearing more and more about French startup accelerators, and I'm seeing a lot more seed-stage startups. So people are making an effort to serve this market. But there's still a lot of opportunities.

What happened to the French minitel users; where are they now?

Was there a particular social forum that ruled minitel - did it transition to the web?

Minitel adoption was never as big as with the current Internet, and users didn't suddenly migrate from one to the other. Minitel mostly bled to death as the Internet grew in popularity.

So... the French AOL then.

More like French BBS scene.

Minitel killer app was the yellow pages. The other predominant usages were mail order and sex chats/porn. Some games too but nothing significant and nothing social, at scale at least.

That's surprising since Reddit at least translates their site into every language - how many times have you googled something and gotten back a reddit hit for an English language reddit page but with Portuguese UI? so reddit has done more than many to internationalize their site.

Probably a strip of language names along the top, taking you to language-filtered frpnt-pages would help. It would be ugly, but it's Reddit.

to most french people, it's the actual content being in english that isn't helping...

I know, I just mean offering a French-language Reddit UI is better than many other platforms.

That said, http://fr.reddit.com/ should be the top posts from the French-language subreddits, not just the main frontpage with a French UI.

I can only imagine the nightmare of manually selecting subreddits for each languages though!

Subreddits have a "language" setting, although the data is probably dirty since the value is unused AFAIK - for all we know /r/pics is currently set on "Klingon". The Reddit admins would probably have to do some manual dirty-work, but iirc the "default subs/front page" reddit listing is somewhat manually curated anyways.

either way, if you stick to the idea of an entirely french version, fr.reddit.com/r/football will lead you to the american football subreddit, but for a french guy they would expect soccer to be there...

It's still gread that they provided a multilingual UI, but as a whole, us companies could always use to understand the foreign market a little bit better than just providing a UI translation...