You said it -- encryption is a big deal but images and video aren't. Social media and chat are fine being entirely text based. Consider it a commentary on social media and chat, not on 1980s era graphics.

> images and video aren't. Social media and chat are fine being entirely text based

... I mean, speak for yourself. I think most social media and chat users would find lack of images to be a significant loss.

And here we are, discussing this on hacker news.

Meanwhile, something like three or four orders of magnitude more people are scrolling on TikTok.

I vehemently disagree. If I couldn't send images and video to my friends, my experience would be orders of magnitude poorer.

Case in point, I literally just finished making my foam cutting CNC machine two minutes ago, and all my friends around the world have already seen a video of it in action. That's worth a lot to me.

Even "text-based" gets iffy if you want to support i18n and proper text rendering of non-Latin scripts. We take that stuff for granted today, but it's probably infeasible on pre-mid-1990s hardware.