Twitter Will Finally Stop Making Your Images Look Terrible | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Will Finally Stop Making Your Images Look Terrible

onezero.medium.com

27 pointsfewi9 comments

Next, maybe Twitter can assign a big team the multi-month project of making it so that when you click an image, to zoom for more details:

* it doesn't ever shrink the image size (as currently happens with certain oversized/proportioned images)

* it doesn't add new overlays obscuring edges of the image that you just clicked to get a fuller view

Baby steps! I know they're running a cash-starved skeleton crew over at their non-profit hobby site.

Perhaps after they close these tickets they could make the website load successfully more than half the time?

Ah, nevermind. I’m asking for way too much.

The depreciation of digital images is an interesting phenomenon. Like the real paper, the quality of memes on the Internet gets worse and worse over time. We were promised that digital medium would never lose quality yet here we are. Of course, it's not just lossy compression but bit rot too.

I wonder how we will be tackling these problems in the future. Maybe, at some point, the savings of JPEG will be negligible for what we have so we'll have images as PNGs?

The phenomenon of meme photo degradation is indeed an interesting one.

I think that is one reason I have always been put off by memes even when they come from loved ones, the photos look LITERALLY dirty, as if passed around by hand :)

a lot of that has to do with meme-regurgitator sites that stamp their watermark all over an image.

the reality is that the picture is being passed around by way too many automations that apply filters or reencodes with little regard to the quality drop, and lots of priority going to making the image smaller, and thus cheaper to host.

>and thus cheaper to host

Sure, if you host all the images on S3. But why would you? Anywhere else you can get unmetered gigabit for a few hundred/mo, the savings would be non-existent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepFriedMemes/

Yes, this is apparently a multi-billion user site used to share images, which doesn’t know that the image which is currently being uploading has already been compressed at a quality setting lower than what they are about to try recompressing the image at, and so will endlessly recompress the same image ad nauseam until it becomes illegible. But now, maybe not. But only if the upload the image through a web browser. So impressive.

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Gross.

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