https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29531145
6 months ago, 1225 points, 357 comments. So a dupe it is.
Thankfully it's very sunny right now in Spain.
It was approximate, because I didn't have the original images (Or I only had one), but IMO JPEG looks better per pound of bits than dithering. At the same bitrate as their dithered images, it looks a bit crummy, but you can still pick up details that the dithering loses.
They won't admit it's for the aesthetic. If dithering looked as good bit-for-bit as JPEG, independent of aesthetic, nobody would have invented or adopted JPEG.
I'd be curious (really, not being snarky) if you tested for that as well.
EDIT: nope, I'm wrong, they say they're doing it for bandwidth.
No to webp as it's a still vp8 video frame meaning an image codec is burdened with a huge video codec dependency.
A 4-cols PNG can be halfish a JPEG.
Of course, a ~10% quality JPEG can be one fifthish of the original, and present more apparent information than the PNG - but it will look dirty.