In the end what happens is people use text overlays in the IMAGES in order to reply to each other.
Since you edited your response to mention the birthday card:
Yea - on the one hand you can leave a boring "Happy Birthday" message with lots of glitter to make it memorable.
Or you can make the message memorable.
To pick just one example[1]: a lawn forum where people will try to ask a question, or share an experience, and go back and forth trying to describe the details. A photo cuts that pain out and enriches the conversation.
Not really. Take a look at any email discussion like the Linux kernel mailing list or the git mailing list. Same thing with newsgroups (usenet).
good lord, how old are you?
Tons of visual clutter with all kinds of rectangles nested inside each other all over the screen with little apparent purpose for any of them. Join dates of users are given higher visual precedence to the date a comment was made (why is the join date of a user even visible on a discussion page at all?? That's pointless clutter!) 90% of users attaching signatures to every comment they leave with the signature body being longer than whatever remark they left, and often being filled with shitty animated gifs that look like they were stolen from somebody's geocities page.
It's a trash medium. Fundamentally flawed. Trying to fix typical PHP forums is like trying to polish a turd.
Oh my god. At my work, HR likes their email super-formatted to a degree that's not portably achievable with even hand-written HTML. The solution someone once came up with? Their email consists of a single embedded image the size of a typical monitor. All text, all information is in that image. They also have a requirement for everyone to use their standard format for "professional" signatures in their own mail. Of course, those are also embedded images. In a discussion, with each reply of each person, the corresponding signature image is included.
I wish I could tell them that email only allows for plain text, but of course that's not the case.
That doesn't sound optimum use of image at all.
> Or you can make the message memorable.
And use image that make it even more memorable at the same time.
Text and images are tools, both can be misused, but that doesn't means that they are bad. Remember SMS text? Works for sure, clearly not optimal, yet text is pretty good to make message memorable.
I can explain in a thousand word an issue on a page, but you can also just share a screenshot. That's an optimum use of images. Sure you could just write "see screenshot #1", "see screenshot #2", etc.. but I'm pretty sure you'll agree that it's not optimum.
That way the big screenshots don't destroy the flow of text like in http://example.jpg [+] (open inline) and instead information is condensed and digested in the most optimum way possible.
It's not text or images that make forum content good or bad or memorable. It's good people doing good work. And different people work well in different media. Saying that text is the only legitimate form of media is both ignorant and disrespectful.