Thu 09 January 2025

I recall once having a discussion with some friends online about which chat client/network to use for communication, and someone strongly endorsed one over another because it had a better selection of animated reactions/videos. I was pretty incredulous that that was the most important thing to them.

Imagine if you will every single short-form (silent) video/animation being sent across the internet right now, whether on chat networks, or social networks, or any other part of the internet where short-form silent video/animated content is sent. Imagine how much duplication there is:

• A million copies of Elrond saying, "I was there, 3000 years ago."
• A million copies of the same dancing birthday cake
• A million copies of the same holiday greeting
• A million copies of the same football goal
• A million copies of Tom and Jerry chasing each other
• A million copies of Elmo dancing
• A million copies of chimpanzees laughing in a car
• A million copies of Harrison Ford telling off Chewbacca for sleeping with his wife
• A million copies of the same kitten snuggling up under a blanket
• A million copies of the same cat riding a unicorn
• A million copies of the Shaq dancing
• A million copies of Steve Carell saying something crazy on The Office

It's not as if all of these images/animations are all stored centrally and just referenced by URL. They are looked up on various services, and most often sent individually as individual attachments, usually by a keyboard application which has a built-in search feature for this type of content.

Here's the funny thing: how often are these images seen for the first time, compared to the hundredth time? They're rote. They're memes. The content is nearly meaningless, it's the context that matters. The video/animation itself is a mere signifier of meaning, not the carrier of it.

So why spend megabytes per copy of each image/animation/video?

Let's put it another way:

Imagine you've just posted something on your favorite social network (I know what mine is!) describing something positive you've recently done, and I respond. Here is what you see in my response:

<thor_cause_thats_what_heroes_do.mp4>

Confused, you wait for the clip from Thor: Ragnarok to load, but it never does. You hover your cursor over the text, but it doesn't change color. You click/tap on it, but nothing happens. It's just text.

Let me ask you something: Did you actually miss anything? Did your mind have any trouble recalling the exact details of that scene (at least the part of it that would show on a typical shared clip)? Can you picture Thor pointing and saying that precisely as if you just watched it again? Of course you can. You've seen it a dozen times.

If then the mere inclusion of a fake filename for a well-known meme video clip is sufficient to recall the content of it, then why should we be sending thousands or millions of copies of it to and fro on the internet?

Normalize sending fake file names for well-known video memes, rather than the video themselves

This would not only save our own bandwidth (which you may not care about), but the bandwidth and storage costs of small fediverse instance owners (which you probably do care about!)

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 4

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Entertainment Humor Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Productivity