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Comment by Worf | Hacker News Reader

If we could get rid of useless stock photos, the world would be a better place. An article about headaches doesn't need a picture of someone with a headache. WE KNOW WHAT A HEADACHE IS. An article about someone arrested doesn't need a picture of a generic crime scene. An article about Facebook doesn't need a photo of a monitor at an angle showing Facebook.

But apparently it drives engagement because people can't sustain their focus on text-only media?

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To get around this problem , I personally use a ON/Off extension and only load images if article "...is interesting enough ..." But yes, lots of images only have a very weak usefulness ....

What's the extension, if you don't mind?

I'd love an extension that classifies images and somehow blocks stock photos or keeps anything that's not a photo like charts and graphs. For crime and police stories, not that I regularly stumble upon those, I want to see the real crime scene or the real perp, but not a stock photo of a police tape or a judge's gavel. If everything is "off", I wouldn't know what I'm missing.

Just turn off Auto Load Images in Netscape.

Instructions here: https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_Auto_Image_Loadin...

Help, I'm now stuck in the 90s. Or at least give me some stock tips or something.

Buy Apple.

And that cheeky little online book store that Jeff Bezos dude is running from his parents' garage: Keep your day job, but also make time to go over there in person and figure out a way to give him all of your money for as long as he'll take it. He'll want to keep calling all of the shots and that's fine. Let him.

Instead of useless stock photos we now have useless AI generated photos.

True, but some sites, especially the smaller ones, make fun artistic AI images in a certain style with some quirky elements thrown in. It's not drawn by a human, but the prompt for good images that I personally like (or tolerate, at least) is usually way more creative than the search query for the boring stock image ever was. If the stock image was a judge's gavel, the AI image would, for example, be a judge's gavel threatening the hidden accomplices of the accused that the article is trying to allude to. It may be in an 8-bit style if it's for cybercrime perpetrated by a nation state. Just a random example that I haven't seen, but it's much more fun than a shitty stock photo. Useless, of course, but gets a "hah" from me once in a while. And it makes stock photo companies die.

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