I wasn’t sure I had anything so I opened my reddit page just now to see, had to be from there since the only other major social media account I’ve had is a facebook that I deleted in 2011. Then I realized I actually kind of did have something that counts, even if it wasn’t a post. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t make public posts at all on facebook when this started getting me reactions, you needed a university email to use the site in the first place.
I had tried to upload some silly photo I found accidentally on an image search to be my profile picture and it was declined for being too big. That image was absurdly large for some reason, I wasn’t sure why a photo of five overly serious-looking German businessmen standing in front of a sign that read “PEES” needed to be taken with a camera with a resolution that high, but I had figured facebook would just rescale it for me the same way the image search had done before I opened the original. Trying to dodge this restriction, I realized that rather than a filesize limit, facebook had limits on how many pixels wide and how many pixels tall an image could be. I set out to test those limits and was successful in doing that.
Not being satisfied with my search for those numbers only being a five-minute excursion, I next set out to test the limits of when facebook would resize your photo, but I found it would only resize if it went over the width. I had the amusing idea to put the width at the resize limit and give it the maximum height, so that anyone opening my page had to scroll for an eternity to post on my “wall”. I thought that was pretty funny.
But then! I realized that I could use an image the same width as a thumbnail and it still wouldn’t resize it. I just left the words “testing how tall I can make the picture” on the image. That took four or five lines since “testing” already took up almost all of the thumbnail width with a legible font size, but I had more than four or five lines worth of space to work with.
If someone was friends with (for example) my friend Ryan, anytime one of Ryan’s friends opened his profile and my name made it to the randomized list of six friends, they would have to scroll an absurd length just to get to the bottom of Ryan’s page to leave a comment on his wall. Since everyone’s friend list was only like fifty people it would usually only take a few refreshes to show up. I heard from basically all my existing friends that they were getting complaints about me, but I also was getting a bunch of friend requests from people I had never met to leave praise on my wall. People thought I was a social butterfly who obsesses over adding every acquaintence because I had like 400 friends at a time when that was absurdly uncommon.
When it opened up that you could dm people you weren’t friends with I got a few of those every week. At some point facebook did start resizing for height too and I still like to believe that my profile picture was the one that forced their hand.
I wasn’t sure I had anything so I opened my reddit page just now to see, had to be from there since the only other major social media account I’ve had is a facebook that I deleted in 2011. Then I realized I actually kind of did have something that counts, even if it wasn’t a post. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t make public posts at all on facebook when this started getting me reactions, you needed a university email to use the site in the first place.
I had tried to upload some silly photo I found accidentally on an image search to be my profile picture and it was declined for being too big. That image was absurdly large for some reason, I wasn’t sure why a photo of five overly serious-looking German businessmen standing in front of a sign that read “PEES” needed to be taken with a camera with a resolution that high, but I had figured facebook would just rescale it for me the same way the image search had done before I opened the original. Trying to dodge this restriction, I realized that rather than a filesize limit, facebook had limits on how many pixels wide and how many pixels tall an image could be. I set out to test those limits and was successful in doing that.
Not being satisfied with my search for those numbers only being a five-minute excursion, I next set out to test the limits of when facebook would resize your photo, but I found it would only resize if it went over the width. I had the amusing idea to put the width at the resize limit and give it the maximum height, so that anyone opening my page had to scroll for an eternity to post on my “wall”. I thought that was pretty funny.
But then! I realized that I could use an image the same width as a thumbnail and it still wouldn’t resize it. I just left the words “testing how tall I can make the picture” on the image. That took four or five lines since “testing” already took up almost all of the thumbnail width with a legible font size, but I had more than four or five lines worth of space to work with.
If someone was friends with (for example) my friend Ryan, anytime one of Ryan’s friends opened his profile and my name made it to the randomized list of six friends, they would have to scroll an absurd length just to get to the bottom of Ryan’s page to leave a comment on his wall. Since everyone’s friend list was only like fifty people it would usually only take a few refreshes to show up. I heard from basically all my existing friends that they were getting complaints about me, but I also was getting a bunch of friend requests from people I had never met to leave praise on my wall. People thought I was a social butterfly who obsesses over adding every acquaintence because I had like 400 friends at a time when that was absurdly uncommon.
When it opened up that you could dm people you weren’t friends with I got a few of those every week. At some point facebook did start resizing for height too and I still like to believe that my profile picture was the one that forced their hand.