tigeruppercut

Guess you never ran across that kids book from the 70s. Apparently it also became a Seattle mascot. Anyway I never thought of it as a fancy word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheedle

It's an interesting theory, but it's not so much the information density that bothers me, it's the explosion of graphics everywhere, which feels dumbed down to me in the other direction. Like on the rakuten page I linked, it's not good enough to list "3 awards" with bullet points and a small graphic, they need 2 screens worth of huge text next to trophies and stars. It's like they don't trust their customers to read something unless it's got giant text the size you'd find in books for literal toddlers and exciting or cutesy graphics to grab your attention. I get standing out in marketing, but it feels unfocused, like they couldn't decide on the couple things to highlight so you have to scroll past more than a dozen flashy banners to just click on the thing you're already on the page to buy.

On a separate somewhat related note, the literalness or overexplanation of the information also feels too much. Like they can't just have a simple title for a movie, manga, or webpage, they have to give a synopsis of the work in the title. Like how Pixar's Up becomes "Old Man Carl's Flying House". Or a site about the history of chocolate isn't just "History of chocolate and cocoa", it becomes "What's the history of chocolate? Also an explanation about the origins of cocoa". There's no extra info in that title, it's just longer.

I get that it's largely cultural, but if I could posit a theory it might just be like that because it's always been like that, rooted in how Japan is so slow to change. Ad company shacho rejects ads that don't barf colors because that's what he saw in ads when he was growing up. If I could make a somewhat skewed analogy, US TV shows through the 2000s had laugh tracks, but now if a show does that it feels lowbrow, almost bordering on insulting.

A multinational like Amazon has to balance what works best in a particular market with retaining a consistent identity across markets and having shared functionality between different locations.

Why would this be the case? If they want to maximize sales in Japan they'd surely provide the best format for the Japanese market, as any views from other countries would be minimal. Maybe if it were in Europe or another site that serves markets that are in close proximity to other ones, but no one's ordering things from an isolated island with a high population if other options are available. And even with varying options the format doesn't need to change.

I remember awhile back looking for hot sauce (as in something that's actually spicy instead of like tabasco bullshit, which is (or was at the time) uncommon in Japan), and the amazon options just listed sellers from the US with high shipping costs. So when Japanese people want foreign goods, why wouldn't amazon provide a format that "people want", while still pulling from other markets?

The fact that they don't do this leads me to believe that the rakuten layout isn't the only way to profit in Japan, and in fact might not even be the layout that most Japanese people prefer.

The USA is one of the few countries on earth to use a continent name as part of its country name. Yet you don't see too many people saying South Africa should refer to the entire southern part of the continent.

People also don't seem to have a problem with using "US", which overlaps with Mexico aka EUM (or USM in English). Like I said, it's mostly a language and cultural divide. Are you advocating that Canadians or Mexicans should say they're American, even if they don't want to? In the English speaking world no one other than the USA says American.

Yeah that's it. They like to put it in the middle of the page for some reason.

Lol I live in Japan and the fact that their web webpages suck is a relatively constant thorn in my life here.

Have you considered that they don't? Microsoft and google are all about anti consumer in service of ad revenue and selling user date in their products these days, but not many people are arguing that US consumers enjoy spyware and less functionality than we had 20 years ago.

how

ed: Allow me to expand: you think rakuten, a company with billions in revenue, does testing in the Japanese market, but amazon, another company with billions in revenue, refuses to do so? Who's doing mental gymnastics here to preserve their idealized image of Japan?

What do you mean by "web marketing"? In most countries they've moved onto web 2.0, but Japan is still mostly stuck in the past and lots of their sites look worse than random angelfire webpages from 30 years ago.

So amazon doesn't do extensive testing in countries other than the US?

People who are adamant about "America is too confusing" are very rarely in agreement with "Afro-Eurasia", such that if someone says "Colombians are American", they're unlikely to say "French people are African" or even "Afro-Eurasian".

It's a cultural/language thing, rather than an objective one. There's no reason that (most) English speakers who don't call Peruvians "Americans" are any more incorrect than Peruvians who don't say "Spanish people are Africans" are wrong. But it's become a whole thing on the internet to say that "USians are dumb and wrong" for not having the same language concepts as other cultures. There are just different numbers of continents taught in different cultures.

But as a tourist, does anyone from outside the US say "I'm American" when they're asked where they're from? Canadians at least sure as fuck would never say that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent?useskin=vector#Number