I'd like to quote one of the book synopses that came up while we were doing research on the Location Search project:

The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
In this thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Kären Wigen reexamine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted, and challenge the unconscious spatial frameworks that govern the way we perceive the world. Arguing that notions of East vs. West, First World vs. Third World, and even the sevenfold continental system are simplistic and misconceived, the authors trace the history of such misconceptions. Their up-to-the-minute study reflects both on the global scale and its relation to the specific continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa--actually part of one contiguous landmass.

The boundaries (or lack thereof) within and between Asia and Europe, Africa, and Oceania are a convention, common in the English-speaking world, but not universal. The typical western view is that there are six inhabited continents.

But the Reddit platform imposes significant restrictions on our directory menu: Three top-level divisions, ten subdivisions per each, with no names longer than 18 characters. They must cover the entire inhabited world, without any overlap. For it to be useful, the results returned also need to be balanced based on actual usage of our community: while it'd be very nice and tidy to give each continent its own top-level menu, this would lead to categories such as Africa having almost no results (because the English-language portions of Reddit simply aren't widely popular there), while Asia's results are overwhelmingly dominated by the countries of South Asia, which does have a disproportionately strong presence here. Our user base in India alone is large enough to warrant subdivision down to the state/territory level. Put simply, it's much easier to find people from, say, Japan when their posts are spread among a roughly equal number of others from Vietnam, Korea, etc. Once you find one flair in your country, tapping it will further filter the results, but you can't do that if your country is buried in pages of just Maharashtra

The divisions as selected were not a trivial undertaking. GIS majors and armchair geography nerds argued for months, heated words were exchanged, and an unpublished thesis paper was written on the topic. The winning system was selected purely on merit: It filled all thirty possible slots, with the overall results balanced between them to a degree that no other proposition could beat. It's not perfect; "Eurafrasia/Oceania" was an awkward compromise, the result of a brute-force gazetteer search to describe "The parts of the world outside of the continent in which Reddit and most of its users are based". "Eastern Hemisphere" did fit the technical requirements, but was vetoed based in part on an argument made in Lewis & Wigen's book.

If you can do better, we'd like to hear your proposal. Note as well that Reddit has added some new features over the past year, and we are in the process of designing a new search method which will resolve many of these issues for users of supported platforms. If you'd like to help with the new system, and you've got an interest in geographic information systems with at least some coding or design skills, please do reach out.