Against photos (rant)

I’m getting to the point where I flat out hate images on the internet.  Every article, every web page, seems to be a little nest of crummy, boring, slow to load photos.  Some photos are very good, but most of the time there is nothing to see, nothing to look at, just more distractions paraded in front of the eyes.

“Every page a home page.”  Boo.  It’s as if someone woke up and realized that one page leads to another, one click leads to another, and very little other than the headlines is being read.

And every page is supposed to invite placement on Facebook and clicks from Facebook viewers; maybe that is what the photos are for.

How should I feel about this development?: “Seemingly overnight, video uploading and viewing have exploded on Facebook, where users now watch 4 billion video streams a day, quadruple what they watched a year ago.”  Video on mobile is just getting going.  I now dread clicking on the ESPN NBA links with the volume on.

From my admittedly atypical, hyperlexic point of view, the quality of the digital universe is deteriorating rather rapidly.

I am not suggesting any of this is market failure, rather it is the “readers” getting what they want, good and hard.

I wish to thank two MR readers for discussions related to this blog post.