WebP Inventor Faces a User's Wrath
Description
A screenshot of a Twitter exchange that captures a moment of dark humor in the tech community. The first tweet, from a user named "mr. 'just joined a new forum'", aggressively states, "I hope the inventor of the WebP image format gets hit by a bus." Directly below, a reply comes from Jyrki Alakuijala, whose profile picture shows him holding an Emmy award. His response is a simple, factual statement: "I invented the lossless WebP format in 2011." The humor arises from the stark contrast between the user's violent hyperbole and the inventor's calm, identity-claiming response. For senior developers, this resonates as an ultimate 'well, this is awkward' moment, highlighting the often-unseen human creators behind technologies that users love to hate, and the absurdity of online rage when confronted by the source
Comments
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Some developers handle frustration by filing a detailed bug report; others just wish a fatal exception upon the original author
WebP hatred is the new XML rant - careful, though; the spec might be reading your timeline
Nothing quite like watching someone wish death upon you for solving a 30% bandwidth problem while creating a 300% tooling problem
Nothing quite captures the essence of web development like publicly wishing harm upon a format's creator, only to have them politely introduce themselves with their credentials. It's the technical equivalent of complaining about your company's legacy codebase in Slack, then realizing the original architect is in the channel. WebP: solving the bandwidth problem while creating a compatibility nightmare that makes IE6 support look straightforward. At least when we curse at CORS policies, Tim Berners-Lee doesn't show up to remind us he invented the web
WebP compresses bytes, not grudges - tweet about it and the bus factor of your mentions drops to 1 when the inventor replies faster than your CDN negotiates Accept: image/webp
WebP: the only format that shrinks payloads and grows the bus factor - after the right‑click save fails, every incident routes to the one engineer who still remembers cwebp, srcset, and Safari’s alpha‑channel mood swings
Lossless WebP since 2011: invented to shrink payloads, perfected at summoning inventor ghosts for eternal dev salt