It’s a hyperbole. It’s not unethical. But many people don’t like it/hate it.
An image is just more expensive than text. Text is usually ~1 byte per character. An uncompressed image is ~3bytes per pixel. Of course, most images are compressed, and compression does a lot of heavy lifting. But still. Also, you don’t need to uncompress plain text. More amount of bytes means more storage expense, more network expense, and worse user experience due to latency.
We have plenty of tools that work for text. You can copy-paste it. You can easily edit it with just a keyboard. It is easily configurable via fonts and font sizes.
Accessibility: text can be read by screen readers. Images (without alt text) cannot. Maybe there are some fancy screen readers that OCR images, but then it’s the case of point 1.
Text is easily indexable. Which means that it’s searchable. If the reddit search tool were any good, it could find the post. Not for images. Alternatively, 3rd party search tools such as google and DDG work.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do what you do. You just asked why someone would be against doing an image post when it could be a text post and I answered.
What you are doing cannot be done with text posts because of reason 2 and 3.
To be clear, Ek is talking about posting image posts on Reddit who allow video uploads. I don’t think this is a problem there. Moreover, the infographics are more successful at getting attention than just plain-text comment-posts. It is what it is.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s a hyperbole. It’s not unethical. But many people don’t like it/hate it.
There’s probably many more points.
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2 months ago
The post will get ZERO traction if it’s not a image post, I’ve tried.
Did you read what my post was about?
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do what you do. You just asked why someone would be against doing an image post when it could be a text post and I answered.
What you are doing cannot be done with text posts because of reason 2 and 3.
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2 months ago
Text posts simply don’t get the same message across though, which is why they aren’t as effective.
You can communicate a LOT more info in a short time-span with a image.
Skavau@piefed.social 2 months ago
To be clear, Ek is talking about posting image posts on Reddit who allow video uploads. I don’t think this is a problem there. Moreover, the infographics are more successful at getting attention than just plain-text comment-posts. It is what it is.
elephantium@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Content-Encoding: gzipwould like a word.