Being bilingual used to feel like a cheat code on the internet.

Growing up, I had access to double the content. Need a tutorial? I could check both Brazilian blogs and international YouTube channels. Looking for help with some obscure tech issue? There's probably a deep-dive post in some Brazilian youtube video and a Reddit thread in English. It was like unlocking two parallel internets.

And don't even get me started on the memes. It's the backbone of the Brazilian internet.

But lately? It kinda sucks.

Back in the day, language on the web was mostly manual. If I wanted Portuguese content, I'd search in Portuguese. If I wanted English content, same thing. Search engines and platforms didn’t make assumptions—they showed results based on what I typed, not what language they thought I preferred.

Brazil, in particular, has always had a vibrant and generous online creator base. From tutorials to reviews, forums to DIY hacks, there's no shortage of valuable, high-quality content. Being able to tap into that and global sources felt like a genuine edge.

Now, platforms have gotten "smarter"—and that's where things went downhill.

Decisions made certainly by non-bilingual people now plague the web.

Sites like Reddit and YouTube are increasingly aggressive with auto-translations. Earlier this year, Reddit started automatically translating posts based on some mix of your device language, browser language, and location. YouTube sometimes auto-translates video titles, comments, and even captions whether you want it or not.

In theory, this is helpful. I could see it being useful for some people in some instances. But in practice, it's chaos.

I often have my OS in English and my browser in Portuguese (or vice versa, depending on where I am. The result? Reddit ends up translating Portuguese posts into English and English posts into Portuguese. And let me tell you: nothing ruins the vibe of informal internet text faster than a machine translation of slang, sarcasm, or community-specific language.

You get the worst of both worlds. I can read both languages fluently — but now I have to fight the platform to get the original text.

For Reddit specifically, I have to remove a query parameter to get the original text. There's not even a dedicated toggle anywhere for this (as of now).

The core issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding: these platforms treat language as a proxy for location or device settings. But bilingual users don't fit into neat boxes.

Again, I could see this being useful for some people. If you're not bilingual, having some translation is better than not understanding anything at all.

But I don't need everything in one language. I want control.

Language isn't just about comprehension—it's about tone, nuance, rhythm. Auto-translation bulldozes all of that.

This isn't a complex ask. A simple toggle would solve 90% of the frustration.

Let users:

Right now, the default behavior assumes bilingual users don't exist — or that we want help we never asked for.

Being bilingual still feels like a superpower. But increasingly, it also feels like a bug in the modern web's logic.

We're not asking for much. Just that the tools we use every day respect our ability to read two languages without dumbing things down.

Until then, we'll keep fighting with buttons, digging for original text, and sighing every time a meme gets butchered by auto-translation.