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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic: This article contains four pictures that contribute nothing to the content and weigh around 10MB. The first one takes up a whole screen of space. Why do people do this?

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It's probably to do with google's algo that favours a certain content-to-image ratio. Medium gives the author access to easily embeddable images that often have nothing to do with the article just so the article's not just one giant block of text.

I would have loved to have seem some photos of this industry out of Africa though.

Ok good, but why do these pictures have to be 2-3MB each? Each one of them would have taken an hour to download just a few years ago (or today, if you live in a less well developed area of the world).

I wonder if there is a way browsers could preemptively “compress“ (I doubt that’s the correct terminology) prior to downloading? Like somehow grab every nth bit, combine, render and then allow for further requests to refine at user discretion. Wonder if anyone has ever tried something like that.

This used to be a feature of Opera. If you enabled it, it would run all webpages through the Opera proxy, which would downsize everything for you.

The wavelet-based image formats like JPEG 2000 were designed to make that sort of thing possible. They never really caught on, though.

I don't think that's even possible with the byte-ordering of a lot of the formats we use today.

Like the pass extraction of PNG [0] would make it somewhat possible, but you'd need to be dropping packets which you might as well receive. I don't think you'd be able to break after the first pass.

JPEG is probably worse.

However, the super-modern formats that are still gaining popularity, like WebP absolutely do support this. At the core of WebP is block prediction, so a low-bandwidth application might actually assume the values of certain blocks so it doesn't need to fetch them.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-PNG-20031110/#4Concepts.Encod...

I know that Opera had this feature once and Google Chrome on Android does this via it's "Lite mode":

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?co=GENIE.Pl...

This feature is built into Jpeg images, though most image editors don't save them with this enabled by default. People call them progressive jpegs.

https://www.thewebmaster.com/dev/2016/feb/10/how-progressive...

Used to be really common around the late 90s/early 2000s...

Yeah People have to justify the cost of a their retina screens

I was downloading MP3s to my MP3 player with a 16MB san over ISDN circa 2000. For most people in the US it hasn’t taken hours to download an MP3 for over a decade maybe 2.

Ca 2000 will always be just a few years ago to me.

Besides, there are areas in Germany today where you can't get >1Mbit connections.

SEO. Despite all the AI buzz, Google's search is pretty hackable with tricks like this.

Besides the SEO redact207 mentioned, readers are often driven away by a block of text.

And in all fairness, this isn't just a web thing. Most newspapers have historically used all manner of graphical techniques in addition to images to break up text blocks such as subheads, callouts, graphics, lines, etc. (Although, also to be fair, historically newspapers also tended to try to include images that were directly relevant to the story rather than picking random stock imagery.)

I'd rephrase that into skimmers are often driven away by a block of text while readers are driven away by page-filling images. There is an optimum between these two which attracts people from both sides of the divide - a few targeted images can enhance a text and make it look less imposing to skimmers.

Have you ever read a “magazine”? These were pre-internet things that were printed on paper, and included text and images. Often these images were illustrations, rather than photographs. They break up the text walls, attract the eye when you’re flipping through deciding which piece to read, and create a mood.

As to why the images are so huge, well, nobody gives two shits about download size any more in a world where you’re also probably pulling down multiple megabytes of ad images and JavaScript because every damn webpage has to be an app even if it’s purely static content nowadays.

Because even with 100+ million of VC money [1], Medium couldn't be bothered to pay for a CDN that automatically optimizes images and/or optimize the image on their own after the user uploads it.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...

Large blocks of text are intimidating

That said, running these images through any basic image compression utility will probably cut down the size by 50-70%

The fact 4 pictures weight 10MB ;retty much tells a lot about the webmaster.

In some sites/blogs it's good to put many pictures. It really depends on your readers.

In HN people look more for content based articles and they don't care if an article is mostly text without pictures

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