Konsti, tiny doggie

when looking at any format jump, and from where i'm sitting as a creator, it looks like this is specifically for megaplatforms, hosts who are aggregating and serving billions upon billions of images scraped or harvested or otherwise crowdsourced from creators like me, wrung out to the absolute minimum ressource cost for them to re-exploit and re-serve, where that infinitesimal compression gain will pad someone's end-of-year bonus.

My websites, my games, my art, none of these are improved or served by webp. I'm not interested in saving a megabyte in bandwidth for the hundred or so visitors I get a week. I'm not being helped by this. But Google is, Fandom is, Amazon is, all these megaproviders who specifically make my job and my work harder for me, as an independent creator, for the crime of not giving them a cut. These are my rivals, not my benefactors.

Keep WebP obsolete.

Bishop is also on BSky @biggun1/12/2023, 8:43 PM

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Konsti, tiny doggie @konsti1/12/2023, 9:01 PM

Would also like to add in to this, if we wanted to make the argument for saving bandwidth and/or speed up loads, there are a thousand other spots we could look.

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in reply to @warc's post:

nora @noracodes1/12/2023, 6:39 PM

i think that's a good reason to avoid something - but. there's a flipside to this. why doesn't it benefit you? testing it out with my photography, using webp lossy 90% compression cuts my disk usage by 45% for outdoor shots with no loss in quality that I can see. i take a lot of pictures, and that's going to materially save me money, time, bandwidth, etc! native EIP that's actually well supported makes browsing my photo library faster, even on devices where I don't have DigiKam installed. letting me compress things with an alpha channel is great for my blog.

it's completely fine if the format is a net negative for you, but that's not true for everyone, and until other next-gen formats are, yes, as well supported as WebP, it's the best option for many.

www.coolstation.space @warc1/12/2023, 6:53 PM

This is a valid criticism, but i guess to expand on my post, I feel like the benefits to the end user are incidental, a fool's bargain compared to the rewards reaped by institutional network providers. You might see substantial benefits if your usage is intense enough, and it seems yours is- but that pales in comparison to the utility for aggregators who are re-encoding these images regardless of your input.

That practice of re-encoding is further cementing images and animations as "Content" meant only for engagement and as filler for adspace, rather than perhaps a settled and crafted piece of data, to be consumed as it left the artist's hands.

As an artist who does a lot of work with compression artifacting, tearing, textural transformations and the like, re-encoding a finished work can absolutely destroy it- and I see end-user adoption of the format as a necessary step toward an ecosystem where this practice is obligatory for browser support, not just the norm among megaplatforms.

I don't like the acceleration of art-as-lightweight-content. There's value in the entropy of a crispy, greasy jpeg, there's value in the crunchy jittery playback of a gif, and there's value in preserving the medium as a part of the digital artpiece, rather than just a vessel.

nora @noracodes1/12/2023, 7:02 PM

Yeah, I 100% agree with you here - re-encoding sucks, and it's part of the reason I'm skeptical of any centralized platform for artists. Eventually, it becomes more economical for those platforms to put their cost interests above artists' intentions and ability to preserve those decisions.

That said, we already have a problem with re-encoding. WebP doesn't change that. If artists are harmed by their images being re-encoded to WebP, it's because the dominant platforms have power over them, not because a new standard came along. WebP is another choice. For me, it's the right choice. For you, it's the wrong choice. We should have that choice - and the standard itself is absolutely not the reason we don't have that choice. That's Twitter's fault, DeviantArt's fault, and so forth.

www.coolstation.space @warc1/12/2023, 7:12 PM

I think that's the sticking point for me right now, -choice- : in terms of the "legacy" image formats, I have use cases for each of PNG, JPG and GIF, and occasionally i'll even spit out an APNG or a TIFF if it suits purpose. Platforms have varying support for all of these, and varying stances on what they will or won't re-encode.

HOWEVER what differs this time is that while there are once again, multiple viable formats for Highly Compressed work, we're observing a concerted effort from the near-monopoly-holder on browser infrastructure attempting to suppress that variety, that choice, in favour of their own in-house format.

The mere act of Google withdrawing existing support for JPEG XL is narrowing choice in the ecosystem. That image format may as well be as obsolete as Bitmap for web use if >90% of browsers won't display it correctly, if at all. That changes the nature of WebP from a choice to an ultimatum: "You can use this high compression format, or you can submit a standard image and we'll deboost you from search results" (current practice! mind you!)

Suddenly WebP isn't just a fact of life on megaplatforms- it's a task expected of you, as an independent website maintainer. The format is hostile to me because the promoter is hostile to me.

nora @noracodes1/12/2023, 7:18 PM

Yep, I absolutely agree with you there as well. As I said elsewhere, I think it totally makes sense to say, "I would rather suffer poor compression ratios than let Google force me to use a different format." But that's not what the discourse is here right now; a bunch of people (including OP) have been talking about WebP like it has no real benefits for users and independent creators, and that's just not true.

Lots of people pay for bandwidth, not just big companies. I'm upset that JPEG XL isn't supported by Chrome or Firefox, and I'm upset that it's not supported by most of my photography workflow! I'm going to put effort into changing that were I can, even. But I don't think it's reasonable to pretend that there's no reason to use WebP.

www.coolstation.space @warc1/12/2023, 7:27 PM

I don't think that's in contention. Yes OP is about the institutional beneficiaries. Yes my diatribe is also about the institutional beneficiaries primarily- I'm not disputing there are use cases or that there's no attractive qualities.

It's just immaterial compared to the social externalities of it's enforced adoption. It's a trojan horse. I reject its utility on ideological grounds alone, as it is instrumental to a worse web.

I think this is all i have left to say on the matter.

nora @noracodes1/12/2023, 7:28 PM

Makes sense to me!