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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?

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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/

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