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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, lots of writers seem to feel that useless pictures are better than no pictures. I see this all the time with programming blog posts too; they’ll stick some stock art of HTML or a computer on a desk or something like that. With news it’s not just burning through my data plan but sometimes it can be actively misleading, like when they pick a picture to represent something but it’s not the actual thing they are talking about.

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There's actually a really specific reason for this. If you have an image it gets shown in link preview on social sites like Facebook and Twitter - this will also work for the article overview on the site if they have one. Links with image previews get shown larger in the feed and get more clicks. So many writers will always try to have an image, no matter how arbitrary.

You could just put the image in the relevant meta tag, there is no need to actually display it in the article.

But then when you clicked on the picture and didn't see it on the displayed page might wonder if it's the right article, especially if the title was missing or editorialized in the reference.

This is a lost battle. Every news website does this now. Even reputable newspapers who would never consider adding a pointless photograph in print have it as a requirement for every online version of the same articles.

I find it insulting to me as reader. Perhaps they should offer a toggle for it in the user settings.

Newspaper usually need to be printed as cheap as possible, so printing images probably damages that requirement.

Media where printing costs are not a major problem (such as magazines) have always included pictures, mostly as an aesthetic choice - to most (if not all) people, graphical elements here and there make the pages simply look more appealing.

They should use Unsplash. Many a blog post which would have shown a pic of a hoodied hacker starting at minified JS code instead shows a beautiful landscape for our pleasure.

I cant comprehend why would you find it insulting. I mean, this is not even nano-aggression, it really says nothing at all and even less something bad about you.

Sometimes pictures help break up the monotony of the text, sometimes they're there because the editor said this is how things are done. I'd say the second case is true here because no sane person writing that text would think "This article would be too difficult without a photo of a glass of water."

I think this is mostly an aesthetic choice - the page just looks nicer with text broken up by a few images.

Not being a designer; whenever I make a site as a side project I struggle with making it look like anything. I don't mean making it look good; just making it not look like an ultra utilitarian 90's style blocks of text page.

I wonder if there could be a similar situation here. Without some sort of image it's difficult to make the page not look empty or sterile.

This got me thinking of articles by Joel Spolsky. Here is an example:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Text-wise his articles are often very interesting though.

This article contains one of my favorite pieces of his writing:

> you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.”

> Why is it a mess?

> “Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of these API calls are for.”

> Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colorful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.

> Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it’s just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.

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