Thank you for you comment @singer_joseph
Blunt is very reasonable. Blunt cuts to the core issue you as an individual care about and that helps.
The announcement starts with “we are going to extend this effort to better support users globally with how we handle uploaded images” and regularly mentions that the reason for these changes are for global reach. The reason for these changes are not arbitrary or to increase friction, but are to address the very big problem (the thing that is broken) which is PNG images do not load for more than half the internet and another quarter of the internet see so much latency/lag waiting for PNG images to load they just move on and ignore those Tweets altogether anyway. PNGs are so large that they don’t just impact themselves loading, they impact the everything else too as they network gets constrained from moving these large files over small bandwidths – slowing down timeline loads, DMs, searches, everything.
In reality, so few people out of the entirety of the internet can actually consume the PNG format that the initial solution was to just eliminate PNG altogether. So, to be clear, there is a broken thing we are fixing, that broken thing is the large majority of the world cannot load PNG, and the solution was to eliminate PNG.
Enter the efforts of many individuals at Twitter that have pushed to, instead of eliminating PNG, find a reasonable (though admittedly imperfect) compromise.
First is providing of the PNG8 format (and other low depth formats) so that images that can be structure in those formats can be lossless. These images are close to the JPEG counterpart size but deliver lossless quality at the cost of reduced colors. We hope artists can find creative uses for 256 color palettes to share on Twitter, including pixel art and illustrations that have crisp strokes and solid colors.
The second move was to permit the rare occasional PNG that is able to compress better than JPEG to not be converted to JPEG. This is the most expensive part of the transition and is purely in service of some images being able to retain quality without being slower to load in full than a JPEG counterpart.
I know wanting to serve current use cases is a high priority for those concerned. The truth is that there are so many millions that need changes in what we deliver for images so they can even partake in the images on Twitter. That is the reason for the change, and why we are making this investment.
The benefit, we hope creators can appreciate, is that this is in service of reach. You may not be able to reach everyone with pixel perfect content embedded in the Tweet itself, but the content that you do share now has the ability to reach so many more users – users that are artists and fans themselves with just the unfortunate consequence of being subject to slow internet that is not their fault.
Thank you, again, for your comment – this clarity in why we are doing this is important and we should have addressed the specifics sooner.
