No, the US is the main country that loves these messages. Have you seen the size of universities or the government ? It's just clerical staff doing make believe work. Go to any .gov website. They'll throw up a wall of bs before you log in (e.g., https://ttp.dhs.gov/ ).
I used to read an Eastern European world traveler photoblogger who’d been to damn near every country (even a lot that most folks from even semi-developed countries would consider far too dangerous or boring to be worth going out of your way to visit—he’d surely been to at least 150 countries, several more than once) and according to him the specific behavior of posting regulations and signs all over the place is practiced nowhere as much as the US, with only Australia coming sort-of close.
I was a bit blind to it, being a born American, but once he pointed it out I can’t un-see it. The land of the free really does love posting regulations everywhere.
It's the sort of cultural blindness that comes with not being able to read the native languages in all 150 countries this person's claimed to have visited.
Once you're able to read a new language, you see all kinds of new signs, especially when you visit a new country.
It's like how people who only read English think of Japan as some kind of blissful artspace, when the reality is that it is far more overloaded with ads than Western countries. Your mind just processes it as abstractions because you can't read the language.
> in all 150 countries this person's claimed to have visited.
They had mountains of boring photos of traffic signs and fire hydrants and bollards and normal people on the street and in other public spaces living their lives and that kind of stuff in lots of countries, so I'm fairly sure they had been to them. :-)
I don't think their take was a result of blindness to languages they don't/didn't know—we really do seem remarkably keen on posting lots of regulations and restrictions at the entrance to every-damn-place, which I've noticed since he pointed it out. Other places may have those restrictions and one may well find a variety of laws and norms enforced in any of several ways in places with less regulation-posting, should one violate them—they're just (I gather—my own limited traveling supports his take, but I've only been to a few other countries) usually not quite as obsessed with posting lots of notices about regulations on every flat surface where strictly-public spaces meet slightly-less-public or private spaces. Since having it pointed out, I've noticed that I'm (when not thinking about it) ignoring a bunch of notices akin to a click-through EULA when just entering stores, and it's not hard for me to believe that lots and lots of places get by just fine, and not necessarily with fewer de jure and de facto restrictions on behavior, with far less posting of notices about those restrictions. Clearly it's not terribly necessary since I'm pretty sure most of us hardly pay any attention to it.
They had mountains of boring photos of traffic signs and fire hydrants and bollards and normal people on the street and in other public spaces living their lives and that kind of stuff in lots of countries, so I'm fairly sure they had been to them. :-)
While I'm not familiar with the particular blogger of which you speak, I'm always skeptical about travel bloggers who claim to have been in an incredible number of places.
I say this because it's very easy to hire someone on the other side of the planet to take a series of digital photos of their lives and tourist attractions for a week or so and then you, yourself, post a travel blog with their content. Because of exchange rates, often the more exotic the location, the cheaper it is. Sometimes incredibly cheap. Like $20 to some far-off rando can reap thousands in Google Ads for a web site.
I know because I used to do this for an American travel company way back in 2015-ish. Back then, I'd often hire cab drivers to do it because they always had a camera phone with them, and they were always going to airports and restaurants and tourist places and standing around with time to kill anyway.
Back then it would be weird to have a picture of yourself in a travel blog, but since everyone is a narcissist these days, you'd have to Photoshop or AI yourself into the photos and videos to be believable, but that's trivial now.
Again, I'm not saying your guy is a big faker. I'm just saying there are big fakers out there, so be careful who you believe.
With so much of the focus on differences between fire hydrants and street signs in different countries, the direct appeal was niche and the side-appeal that his very light and only occasional commentary on the photos was sometimes interesting, so that seems too indirect to possibly work as a way to catch a money-making amount of readership. This was tail-end-of-the-early-Web sort of stuff, started a few years before the rise of the contracted out ("Four-hour workweek" sorts trying to jumpstart that kind of "hustle", at least in the early days) monetized fake blog.
There was no pitch, and no ads, no self-promotion and barely any personal background at all, it was just "here's a crappy plain list of places I've been that breaks in surprising ways if JS is disabled" and if you clicked the links you'd get some broken-English (sometimes... other times you'll have to get out Google Translate) light commentary on photos he took there, though often there'd be several photos in a row with no commentary aside from maybe basic labels like "a bollard in [city]", that break down as about:
- 30% fire hydrants,
- 20% street signs or other road markers or traffic control devices,
- 20% bollards,
- 5% adaptive architectural details in very-cold or otherwise out of the ordinary environments
- 5% photos of the above things but specifically highlighting how much worse leftover French colonial infrastructure tends to be than British,
- 3% dudes shitting on beaches
- 2% disgusting illegal open air dumps, often on Pacific island "paradises" since I guess they're just covered in such things almost anywhere that's not a tourist hot-spot, which made a ton of sense in hindsight once pointed out—very limited space, lots of goods coming in, not rich enough to send the trash somewhere else, so of course that's a problem,
- nearly 0% any photos of normal landmarks or attractions you'd expect a tourist to take,
and 15% all else, usually observations of drug-related cafe culture stuff (I had no idea there were so many locally-tolerated-and-widely-openly-used but barely-known-to-Americans drugs out there before browsing that blog, often some kind of chewable leafy product or another), non-fancy food, whatever rusty barely-working ancient rural motorized mass transportation he'd ended up on this time, or slice-of-life observational things like a little "movie theater" in a very poor city that's some folding chairs in a little room with a smallish CRT TV and a DVD player at the front and a guy taking money at the doorless entry doorway (or dudes shitting on beaches, already covered separately because it featured weirdly often). Quite a bit of coverage of how shitty planned cities almost always are, and why (too much focus on big, wide roads that don't really need to be that big or wide, with huge unusable green spaces making them even worse, all in the name of getting big impressive sight lines on a few scattered monuments and buildings—this ties into the "place vs. non-place" concept I've seen used to criticize similar types of vision-first and "green space" obsessed city planning on other parts of the Web)
Like, the extreme focus on details most people wouldn't think to take a photo of and that are also kinda boring to nearly everyone convinced me the dude's angle was just that he... found comparing minor but common features of fundamental infrastructure more interesting than most people. When he had photos of anything but that sort of thing, it was more of an afterthought or accident, it seemed like. Plus there weren't even any ads or attempts to promote himself or products.
The European way is to post a gigantic wall of text like 1.5 by 1.5 meters with small letters and a full binding contract somewhere close to the entrance.
All US parking garages have exactly that and it's so weird. Nobody reads them (what, from your car before paying and entering? LOL, nobody even reads the smaller notices attached to the payment machines, nor half the text the displays print during an interaction) so all the work at writing, printing, and posting them is just a kind of weird secular-religion ritual.
Now imagine it's everywhere. Entering a mall? You bet it's long. Entering a post office, bank, government agency? Of course. Entering a barber, restaurant, bar? Yep, even there. Entering a residential building? Yes, the inhabitants actually have a contract about their co-living and how they and others should behave in the common areas.
This translates to ecommerce too - check out the terms of service and privacy policies of some European web shops.
The US does it, too, but it's often separate sheets of printed paper and a few standard-issue laminated posters. Plus a few briefer notices posted to the doors, especially at larger businesses.
It's possible EU states have gotten worse ("worse"—I mean, it's basically harmless, which is why it just fades into the background and it's easy to not even notice it, aside from that the whole thing's a little bit of wasted work) about this since his writing and since I've been there, as the latest of his posts I read were probably from travel in the late '00s, and I haven't been to any part of Europe myself since not long after that.
This has definitely been the case since early 90s all around Eastern Europe. I grew up there. Maybe he didn't notice - these walls of text are close to the entrance but definitely not the most highlighted feature there. I'd guess many locals don't even know - it's just that I like to read random stuff.
I believe you didn't see it, many locals didn't. But I bet you can find it if you go looking. I personally check this stuff, it's my kind of weirdness, and I assure you it's the case in every EU country (I checked) and I'd bet it's the case in every European country.
Europe has its own version of this nonsense (GDPR cookie banners), but that stems from a different misguided belief. Europe believes that banners can affect markets. The US believes that banners can affect the law. Both are wrong.
But it seems unnecessary given the existence of its laws. For example, CFAA makes unauthorized use of a computer system illegal regardless of whether the system communicates it. Perhaps these messages originated prior to the CFAA, in which case perhaps they were necessary back then, and nobody has dared to remove them.
This is unlike trespassing in the US, however, which does require informing the person (written in a conspicuous location, or direct verbal conversation) they are unwelcome on whatever land they began accessing, and allowing them to promptly retreat, before any violation is committed. Access is generally permitted (e.g., to allow for unsolicited deliveries) prior to such communication.
