LJ cuts

The issue of LJ-cuts came up in one of my communities and I bothered to explain to someone why they are good manners. Here is a generalized version of that post that I wholly encourage anyone to use in defense of using the cut. Consider the following text completely public domain, use freely and without attribution.

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There are a number of reasons to use an <lj-cut&gt. A large number of images can bog down how long it takes for the friends page to load, not only for those using dial up (which is still not uncommon in more rural areas and outside North America, just take a look at the directory to see how many users are not from North American urban centres) but if the image server being used is under load your download bandwith becomes irrelevant. If the user hasn't used height and width tags in the images to make the placeholders come in at the right size you can be down past the post and have your text disappear as the page reformats itself as the images come in. Then there are people who view LJ on wireless handheld devices where bandwith is severely limited and pages load in chunks of only a few hundred bytes or a small handful of lines - scrolling down takes time as each chunk loads and scrolling past

[IMAGE]

[IMAGE]

[IMAGE]

[IMAGE]

is a time-consuming pain.

Then there is the simple issue of design. I don't like it when my friends page looks like ass because some n00b in photography community has decided to post 412 blurry, webcam pictures of their ugly mug. I just don't want to see it. And it's annoying to no end if one person decides they are going to post something 1500 pixels wide, forcing everyone that has that person or community on their friends list to scroll sideways back and forth to read each line of text in every other post.

Why do people complain about people who fart in elevators or eat from crinkly packages during movies? A fart won't kill you. Movies are loud and you can hear over the crinkles. Nonetheless they are annoying and unpleasant things for someone to do.

There is a simple rule of thumb for good manners, ask yourself "What if everyone did it at the same time?" If the answer to that is a bad thing then then it is bad manners. For example, what if all 20 posts on your friends page all had 20 images and each images was 300 KB? Would you be OK with a 120 MB friends page? Would you expect everyone else to be? If all 20 posts on your friends page each had one image with a cut letting you decide which to follow and which to skip or come back to later, would that be a bad thing?

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