[endisneigh]

I’ll never get over how regressive it is that we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text.

I seriously cringe each time, lol.

Anyway, on topic, it’s good to see this little debacle behind them. Both stripe and plaid offer good services and competition is good in any case.

I do wonder if there’s some room for innovation here from Google and Apple. It would be interesting to see if it’s possible to login to any website using plain text passwords in a way that can be delegated to other sites without them knowing the password too.

—-

Thinking about this more, if browsers generally allowed this it would allow integrations between sites to be implemented pretty fast by simply scrapping text.

[dang]

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[endisneigh]

Given you can’t read the text if you use a screen reader I would hardly count this as an “annoyance”, plus the majority of my comment is on topic. So idk

[dang]

It's true that such things are annoying but they're so common and so annoying that they easily take over the discussion.

In the case of your comment, literally all of the replies were about the annoyance. Not one was about the on-topic portion of your comment; it might as well not have existed. That's why we have that guideline.

[throwaway1777]

This isn’t regressive at all. It’s a way to preserve and document something that will probably be deleted or made private. The alternative is maybe putting it into a pastebin or rehosting the text somewhere but somehow it seems less trustworthy that way even though photoshop exists. For accessibility purposes alt-text should be possible.

[endisneigh]

https://imgur.com/ju8XgGd

[greenthrow]

It's super regressive. You should be able to maintain all the content and all formatting and styling using far less data than a PNG or JPG of that same text requires. Images of text are super wasteful and their ubiquity is a condemnation of us both as users and software engineers.

[kyle-rb]

Twitter allows alt text but it's dependent on the user including it when they post (@collision did not) and it's limited to 1000 characters.

[sillysaurusx]

4000. Still too few.

[micromacrofoot]

It's definitely regressive, it's not even accessible. Some people literally won't even be able to read it.

[abirch]

If Reddit made it easy for me to follow people and have stuff pop into my feed like Twitter, I'd walk away from Twitter.

[tempest_]

I am pretty sure you can follow users and have their posts show up in some sort of feed but I think it might be a Reddit 2.0 thing and the UI is such trash that I never go there if I can help it.

[tootie]

Ironically, Reddit's main source of news is screenshots of tweets.

[robby_w_g]

Screenshots of tweets shared on reddit is so much faster on my phone than loading Twitter mobile. The screenshot is better UX too since I often get re-directed to a sign up page when I load twitter mobile

[krallja]

That's not true, there's also reposts of TikTok videos.

[twic]

We're doing this for the sole purpose of trolling Ted Nelson.

[skrbjc]

LOL, seems the same way on parts of 4chan these days as well

[dylan604]

>we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text.

In this case, it sounds like the original post was removed, so the only thing left would be images types of things. Also, does an image/screengrab add any more validity to something rather than text quoted on another page/site?

[endisneigh]

It’s not about validity, it’s about accessibility. For example in the image there’s a link which can’t be clicked because the info wasn’t included

[dylan604]

Just pretend it's your mom bringing you a sheet of paper she printed of the website she wanted to show you, or worse, the ambitious mom that then rescanned the printout so she could email it to you.

[endisneigh]

But that’s not what’s happening. Why make a dumb scenario?

[dylan604]

It's the same state of mind. Some one unwares trying to be helpful.

[throwaway09223]

I agree. There's a great lesson here when thinking about the complexity of real world interoperability, and the ramifications of attempts to control information flows.

Frankly, this sort of thing has caused me to become a very regular user of Google Lens on my phone. I just copy the text out of the image and go on about my day.

Improving the usability of image -> text translation is probably the most effective way forward, as silly as that may seem.

[lotsofpulp]

It is crazy to me too. When I was younger, I thought how great it is that we can use websites as a cheap and easy way to authenticate or reasonably assume the authenticity of what was written or said, and here we are using screenshots of text on twitter as evidence.

[a-dub]

it seems the maladaptive images of text thing is being used to work around the 140 character limit rather than any sort of authentication here.

it's pretty funny where you see this and twitter "threads" of like 14+ posts.

life is complicated, 140 characters is not enough.

[dylan604]

What about websites provided something as authentic to you? The not-knowing how easily websites are to make and that anybody can put anything on them? Since you specifically stated "when younger", I'm assuming you no longer feel the same way. Did getting into tech/dev squash the dream of what the internet could have been? It did for me

[lotsofpulp]

Presumably, the website has a history or reputation (such as Stripe or Plaid’s official website). I guess Twitter might serve the same function, especially since this is a real person posting under their supposedly verified account, but I do not use Twitter, so for me, it is less easy to verify the source.

A better example is the tech emails twitter account that posts screenshots. How would I know if they are fake or not?

I would think a website with links to the source material such as the court filings showing the emails on a government website would be preferable.

[jeroenhd]

Luckily, Twitter has accessibility options which you can use to describe/transcribe images so that people with visual disabilities can enjoy your content too!

Not that anybody ever uses that feature.

[ivank]

I use that feature, but it’s effectively broken with the 1000 character restriction.

[op00to]

I was about to say something about how pictures of text are not that bad, and then decided to click through first and .. wow. Talk about fine print. Yeah, that's far too silly!

[notyourwork]

And Elon Musk but the damn platform. Sigh.