Perhaps you could think of it like operating at a different abstraction layer, a sort of overlay network for social communication. It's easier to screenshot new

Perhaps you could think of it like operating at a different abstraction layer, a sort of overlay network for social communication. It's easier to screenshot new technology than it is to make it interoperable with old technology, so there will always be a lead time where screenshots are the dominant sharing method driving a new hype cycle. Look at ChatGPT for example - they launched with no share feature, and people were sharing screenshots of their conversations. It's probably still the most common method of sharing them, even after OpenAI added a share feature. Screenshots have the advantage of working everywhere and being cheap to produce. The loss of information is a solvable problem. In fact if you take a screenshot on an iPhone, there is already quite a bit of information stored along with the photo, but it's removed when using the WebKit <file> input to upload a photo to a website. Also, Safari has a "screenshot full page" option, meaning it already has a specific implementation of the screenshotting for its specific use case of taking a picture of a likely text-heavy Web page (which the same program taking the screenshot already rendered for the user anyway). On the receiving side, Apple's automatic device-local OCR, which already runs on every photo in your camera roll, could increase fidelity of information in a screenshot that you receive. Apple could add a feature for your device to locate the original URL of a screenshot you receive, using both the metadata of screenshots generated on other Apple devices (if shared), and the results of searching the Web for text in an image. This feature could have high accuracy for the limited cases where the content is available on the public web rather than on some ephemeral screen inside an app. But in fact, such cases are even more of a reason that screenshotting will remain a dominant way of storing and sharing information. They're completely decentralized and interoperable, with acceptable tradeoffs that double as advantages - like robustness (screenshot of content will survive longer than a server will continue serving that content), and privacy (the server of the original content doesn't get notified when you read it in a screenshot).