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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
