Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out, so that's very on brand?
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
I think people who speak no english don't end on Reddit in the first place. It had very few traction in France as a far as I know, and facebook groups would be the go to places for most people.
So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.
Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.
I’d say most, but certainly not (almost) all. There are quite a few (real) German subreddits, and most of my countrypeople prefer their native language over English, and are often not even that comfortable with it. Forum culture is also still relatively big in Germany, so for niche hobbies there are probably several forums, I know that for ecigs, the German reddit community can’t hold a candle to the several ecig forums.
Reddit is hiring and some of the job descriptions talk specifically about international expansion, so I guess at least Reddit thinks it is or will be significant.
Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/