Sorry for the delay. Yesterday got away from me.
I've gone ahead and reverted this change for now. It'll go out in the next deploy. I'm going to instead scope these changes to just Stack Overflow. Stack Exchange will still have its mobile view deleted, but will keep the custom images.
We were looking at 404s on the way to killing the mobile views. A few reasons why we want to simplify them:
404s are meant to be rare. Tonally, we think treating them as jokes can further frustrate already frustrated users.
The Stack Exchange network doesn't have dark mode yet, but will at some point. Those old custom images will need to be updated to have dark mode alternatives. We don't have the resources to do this right now. This spot illustration flips colors, and takes custom colors really well.
Those custom images aren't retina-ready, meaning they're really blurry on newer, high DPI screens.
Those images are also heavier to download than these SVG spot illustrations, though that's not a huge concern because, like I said, these pages are rare.
Some of those images are cease & desists waiting to happen. We don't own the rights to some, nor do we provide attribution. I have no idea how GitHub gets away with the Star Wars® reference, and I used to work there!
I hear y'all on it feeling like a loss of culture 😞. I'd like for our theming to be more expressive in the future, but we need to balance that and things being future-proof.
We can revisit this when we have a better plan for what to do with those 404 images. We'll be touching a lot of stuff on the way to a fully responsive site and we've gotta keep chipping away.
