@jhv

OTOH, there are times when degradation is proactive. Back in the 90s, myself was part of a team managing one of the first ecommerce sites, for a major cosmetics and personal care company.

Our client began complaining that the product images on the shopping site looked bad. Whole product lines were sent back to the photographer to be re-shot. We reviewed our entire process for how those photos were produced and added to the catalog database, but couldn't identify the issue.

Eventually, we figured out the problem. Most of the folk who worked for our client were visiting the website from home, via the America Online internet service. AOL was helpfully passing all images through a proxy server that compressed them to provide for speedier downloads.

Our team was able to figure out ways to take the photos such as to ensure they'd survive the compression process without being severely garbled, by essentially taking lower quality photos to begin with, and then having our quality control team test each photo via a computer running AOL in a company hallway, before approving those that survived the proxy for inclusion in the online product catalog.