In addition, if you happen to have a slow connection, all you see is blurred blobs instead of pictures. I never experience that with proper img tags because, you know, most major browsers have been doing progressive loading (which works with basic img tags) since several years ago and it works very well in most cases. I don't see why the guys at Medium felt they needed to reinvent the wheel. I hate Medium's layout and since they allow custom domains it's becoming very hard to avoid Medium links at all.