In a better world, your choice of social media wouldn't matter. You'd pick one of them and communicate with people online, regardless of which social

Screenshots as a layer of interoperability

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2022-10-02 11:00:06

In a better world, your choice of social media wouldn't matter. You'd pick one of them and communicate with people online, regardless of which social network they've picked. There'd be some sort of a consensus on what a post should look like (how many characters, images etc.) and your Facebooks and Twitters of the world would share the data between themselves, allowing you a seamless experience. Since we don't live in that world we have screenshots. And screenshots of a screenshot. And screenshots of a screenshot of a screenshot.

In this version of the web's Russian doll, we have five people, three social media sites, five pieces of "original content", all pointing down to the same 277 characters. A bit more than a quarter of a kilobyte of information.

Each time a screenshot was taken, those 277 bytes got inflated into (probably) a megabyte or two (depending on the phone's screen resolution). Each time a screenshot was posted somewhere, it was compressed down to a couple of hundred of kilobytes. Each time this was repeated the original 277 bytes of information became a little bit grainier and harder to read.