cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/questions/p/1210820/why-the-fuck-do-people-post-photos-of-text-instead-of-just-text
I find this very weird.
On one hand you got text, which is very accessible and very efficient and easy to translate for non-native speakers.
On the other, you got photos of text which is inefficient, hard to translate and not easy to read compared to just text.
So what gives? Why do people use photos of text instead of text?
vast majority of people using phones couldn’t tell you the difference.
because the internet is just six social media platforms and each is full of pictures of posts from the other five
I had an idea to mess with Facebook feeds to see if you could get people fed up enough they would stop using the platform as much.
Convince everyone you know to screenshot and share every ad the Facebook platform puts in your feed, and encourage others to do the same. So others people’s feeds just start to become real ads, mixed with screenshots of ads, shared by your network of social connections, then everyone would start complaining the platform is just ads, and hopefully stop using it as much. Who knows if it would work, but I got a good laugh from it.
On Lemmy/Piefed?
Usually because they’re Tweets reposted from somewhere else (hence OP would have to transcribe to post as text).
The question I have is why post Tweets at all.
Platforms want you to know which platform and which user the text you’re copy-pasting comes from, so they make it much easier to screenshot the text than copy-paste it. Users encounter this often enough that they don’t even bother on platforms that behave better.
(This image has alt text)
Sometimes the meme is the word(s) itself.
Those people know how the platform works. The image gets displayed prominently while a text post gets buried.
It constantly pisses me off that my coworker emails me screen shots of error messages instead of cutting and pasting the text, so I can’t easily just select some of the text to search on.
I can guess a few things. For one, its slightly less effort than selecting the chosen text and copying, though not much less so I don’t think that’s the whole reason. But also, it does technically give more information that otherwise would have to be typed out, like its often possible to tell what platform the text comes from, the username and profile icon of the original poster, etc. And if there’s a chain of several people responding, you can capture the whole conversation without worrying about formatting nested quotes and such. Fonts can also convey mood, which you’d lose if you just copy the text.
Finally, I guess it could feel more clear as to the source, like if you copy paste text with some quote formatting, there’s more room for someone who doesn’t understand the formatting to think you were saying that thing, and it’s immediately obvious that you could edit or make up the quote if you wanted. A picture immediately says “this is something this other person somewhere else said” in a way that’s harder to misinterpret and looks harder to fake (even if in reality making a faked picture of text is easy)
They are fucking lazy. Just imagine the strenous work of typing two or three lines of text, just to save the world from moving terabytes over the net!
I’m with you. When I find one I want to forward to a friend, I transcribe it.
My theory is that since almost everyone is using phones for this stuff, slowness of typing makes grabbing a screenshot more attractive. I do most of my browsing on a laptop, so typing is far less trouble.
I think it must have started back when Twitter first came out and tweets could only have 140 characters, so posting an image of text allowed people to have longer amounts of text. Just a guess.
But since then, I don’t know. I hate it too! It’s so stupid.
I hate seeing this with classified ads. Just earlier today I saw one for a car where they just uploaded a screen recording of them scrolling through the description of the same listing on some other platform. I finally had to say “fuck that” after the third loop or so.
I’d guess it’s because people are either lazy and not wanting to type the text out, or people don’t like / know about modern tools to extract the text for posting.
Also, meme culture doesn’t have the same ring to it when the text is extracted from the picture.
