I agree with GP. Personally, I hate websites that show a blurry version of an image before the final one loads. It plays with my eyes. I have to look away and peek to see if it's done before I can read on.
I wish there was a way to disable this functionality.
It’s even worse when combined with lazy scroll-based loading: now you’re guaranteeing that I’ll see the unpleasant version briefly (especially in Australia, I imagine, where there’s generally higher latency on such requests than in the USA—but I haven’t tried Medium or similar sites from the USA, so I’m not sure if it’s as unpleasant there).
It’s worst of all when combined with lazy scroll-based loading and an unreliable internet connection: I load pages in places where I know I have an internet connection, and then read them in places where an internet connection is unavailable. With lazy loading of these things, I can no longer be confident that it’s actually loaded everything I need. Same deal with Medium’s blocked iframes for things like CodePen—that just means that the iframe is not loaded when I need it to be.
I want less magic, not more, because we’ve proven as an industry that we’re not responsible with magic, and always manage to make a mess with it.
I didn't mean to refer to blurred images, but the unblurred outline SVGs in this article. I think the blurred ones are somewhat pointless too. The unblurred versions give you actual information as to what the image is. For instance, the sneakers image; if I didn't care about sneakers, I'd be likely to just scroll past it. In the blurred version, I might not be able to tell that they're sneakers.
Interesting: I didn't see any images of sneakers. I saw the Golden Gate bridge, and a vague shot of a woman. Are they serving a different set of images (and example js) to different readers?
I wish there was a way to disable this functionality.