It's fascinating because she can see who drops by to read her stuff, and she has a significant number of followers, but it's very passive. No comments, no likes, no interaction at all. The only way people can show their support is by subscribing, and even then that's only shown to the admin.
What kinds of information does she get? Does “subscribing” mean users create an account and therefore the visitors are always tracked? I’m definitely interested in technical details.
As far as subscribing, it's like following, or an RSS feed. They just get notified when she posts. It doesn't show up on their homepage or anything, just gives them a notification that she wrote a new page.
The specific website is www.ameba.co.jp if you want to take a look.
We get a fair number of tourists from a famous western country who gush about how this is wonderful and that is amazing and have you even seen the thing over there? One doesn't need to ask where they're from; one hears them coming from 50m off. I wonder if they view their fellow tourists from more reserved cultures as being more passive?
(If it's any consolation, I can say that half the shit American tourists like about Japan are just "things America used to have but got rid of", like walkable cities and public transit. The other half are things not economically sustainable without them - e.g. arcades and malls that don't suck.)
When I lived in Europe, I had a Swiss girlfriend complement me that I ‘dont dress like all the other Americans’. I got caught up in being flattered but then thought to ask exactly what she meant. ‘You know… they wear the khaki pleated shorts… sandals with socks… a fanny pack and visor…’ Given that she hadn’t been to US, it didn’t take long to realize who these fashion ambassadors just might be…
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/germans-socks-and-sandals-an-explorati...
More bluntly, your brain process languages you don't know simply as noise.
It's kind of easy to hear this from yourself, too: Speak a sentence, but pretend very hard that you aren't hearing the sounds coming out of your mouth as words. You will probably quickly find your "noise" grating.