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Comment by polm23 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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