What I meant for “multilingual internet” is what companies like Reddit or Google are doing. Forcing automatic translates to the user language automatically.

For Reddit this means that, as people write there in whatever language instead of the language of the subreddit, when you use the site outside of the official frontend you see a mix of languages. This means that you search for things in one language and get results written in another language, and you might have been looking for something in a specific language, but as automatic translated websites take over they take away your ability to choose in what language do you want to search things. On youtube for instance I cannot longer know in what language the video is going to be spoken. I might look for videos in one language and get mislead by the automatically translated title, and click into the video and get a shitty AI voiceover instead of the original voice of the video.

For instance I used to search things in Spanish to get “local” websites. Now I search in spanish and I see a bunch of Reddit post about the USA, because reddit forces the translated results into googles feed, and google accepts it. Searching something in a specific language is becoming harder and harder because more and more websites are going multilingual, taking in and serving out any and all languages and doing a bunch of automatic translations in the middle.

Maybe your perception is different. But for me this forced multilingual internet (and what I mean to this is that the frontends automatically translate the content in the business layer) makes for a poor experience with far less freedom and power over the content I choose to see, compared to what I had before.

And also the appreciation, that this might lead to more people not seeing the need of learning a second international language. Which, for me, is one of the most important skills in life, as it gives you the ability to communicate with so many people without being dependant on intermediates.