Suggestions of non-English online communities which are Metafilter-esque?

January 5, 2011 2:33 AM

I'm doing an online community + linguistics project. What sites in non-English languages are like Metafilter?

I sometimes do research on linguistics and online communities, and at the moment I'm looking around for interesting non-English communities.

Since my next project may bring together computational linguistics and conversation modelling, it will be helpful to run analyses of different communities across different languages. I'm especially looking for sites like MeFi, in which people have long posts and extended discussions about a broad range of topics.

What would you suggest?

posted by honest knave to computers & internet (3 answers total)

A little more topicalized than MetaFilter, but a lot of previous studies that I know of non-English online communities have looked into self-help forums (eating disorders, alcoholism, other support groups) and product review sites (Yelp, Flickr and Amazon equivalents). There's been a surprising amount of research done already in Spanish online communities. And I've seen a few German studies as well. Maybe you can get ideas or piggyback on the work that's been started there? I think it's going to be rather tricky to find a non-topic-specific site like MeFi, or even Digg or Reddit, but I'd love to be proven wrong about that.
posted by iamkimiam at 6:31 AM on January 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

LiveJournal has a very extensive Russian user community. Specifically, a community of young and middle-aged adults, not children or adolescents so much. It's not really structured like a group blog or a Q&A site, but a lot of the comment threads can get quite involved. Check out user avva's friend list for some possible leads.
posted by Nomyte at 6:53 AM on January 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thanks! These are both great suggestions!
posted by honest knave at 3:06 AM on January 6, 2011