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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Subreddit moderators prefer first-party content instead of links, because all people do is fill subreddits with affiliate links or blogspam. Mods don't want to handle this, so they discourage external links completely.

In a lot of cases, a link will be posted, but the majority of the article text will be included in a message. So users can have a discussion without even visiting the page.

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I mod a programming subreddit. 99% of our submissions are screenshots. It drives me mad. I tried to enforce pastebin / text posts only a few years ago and the community was firmly against it, so I let it go.

We even have volunteer transcribers (thank you /r/TranscribersOfReddit) who transcribe the majority of posts. The modern internet truly is a weird place.

I used to mod what is now a huge subreddit, and when I started it I made strict no memes/images/blogspam. It was lovely for a few years but then when it became big enough to become a default Reddit basically said you can't do that anymore. Now I see it commonly referred to as one of the most toxic subreddits on the site...

I wonder what the aggregate cost of text-only screenshots is. Not so much the lack of accessibility and discoverability (which are probably the biggest costs), but the energy wasted from the extra CPU cycles, the extra storage space, the increased load on networks.

Come to think of it, it's probably minuscule compared to cryptocurrencies...

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