In the final days of 2013, we discussed a project in which someone uploaded and re-uploaded the same video to YouTube a thousand times, destroying its content due to excessive compression. The artist Pete Ashton decided to do something similar under the name I Am Sitting In Stagram, but instead of using audio or video, he published the same image 90 times on Instagram. The results speak for themselves.
Why Your Photos Look So Bad on Facebook
On more than one occasion I've been asked why some images look so bad on Facebook. The answer is simple: Facebook destroys them. With nearly 1.4 billion active users, storage space is a vital resource for the social network, and this causes internal algorithms to apply an additional layer of compression to images that were already compressed. Needless to say, the consequences are dreadful. The saddest part is that Facebook is not the only one that applies such treatment to images. Both Twitter and Instagram are partners in horror, but Instagram's case is even more offensive. Why? Because we have state-of-the-art cameras that can capture dozens of pixels, only for the social network to leave them at just over 600 pixels per side, a resolution that can be captured with a fifteen-year-old webcam.
The I Am Sitting In Stagram Experiment
If you're not convinced by what I'm saying, just take a look at the artistic project of Pete Ashton, called I Am Sitting In Stagram. Basically, what Ashton has done is take the concept of regramming to the extreme, the same as retweet, but with images. Ashton took an image of Alvin Lucier, the creator of the original project “I Am Sitting In a Room” based on audio, and started the chain by publishing it on his profile. Then he generated a screenshot of his post, and published it again. Ashton repeated the process 90 times, and what remained of the image was a gray mass plagued with vertical lines, with a barely defined outline of what was the original photo, and no color information.
This leads us to two conclusions. The first is that social networks are not suitable for preserving images. There are some exceptions (Flickr comes to mind), but in all cases the services are the ones who write the rules, and the user can only play in their sandboxes, or leave them. And speaking of users, we come to the second conclusion, even more serious than the first: People don't seem to care until it's too late.
