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This comment:

...the rest (the "fluff" actually makes it harder to read your post. This is definitely one of those times when adding pictures really detracts from the answer.

in regards to this answer with +22 votes where the images are at the very bottom of the post, after all of the text.

These three comments:

The pictures are cute but I fail to see how they enhance this answer.

@uhoh - sometimes pictures help, but as I have also mentioned a couple of times, sometimes they are not just unhelpful but actually negatively affect the post. This is one of those cases. Glorfindel's post answers the question, yours is full of pictures that don't answer the question and make it hard to read. Most of your posts would be perfect without the pictures, so please rethink the need to always have them...

When I see a post with unnecessary pictures my initial reaction is that the author is just fishing for upvotes.

in regards to this answer with +10 votes where the images are interspersed, but they are not particularly large.

I'm baffled by several things

  1. How is it self-evident that some images make a post hard to read. This is the internet, we have text and images embedded all the time, browsers on computers and mobile devices are fine-tuned for text+image content. I simply can not see how in 2019 this can be a real, actual, bona-fide problem.
  2. When a post is well-received, there probably wasn't a problem reading it and/or the images were appreciated. Why not just move on to posts that are not well received, and see what can be done to improve them? We can't recreate other people's posts or writing style to conform to our own tastes. Stack Exchange communities evolve. As far as I know there are no rules that say Astronomy SE answers must be spartan.

I spend most of my time in SE between Space SE and Astronomy SE. If I compare the two, I see a lot more armchair criticism on other people's posts and skill levels here than I do there. In Space SE I see what is possible in terms of a healthy, positive community that generally tries to honor each other's styles and attitudes. Here I see much more energy (by some users) put in to pointing out little stuff and irrelevant things that they would have done differently.

So I'd like to ask:

Question: What gives with all these comments about "too many images" in some of my posts?

  • What's wrong with me choosing to show a meteorite that landed on Mars looks like up close?
  • What's wrong with me being amazed by astronomical images and sharing them with others?
  • What's wrong with me sharing a little awe in the cosmos here in Astronomy SE?
  • Why not simply keep things positive? If a post is well-received, be glad for the people who enjoyed it, be glad for the site and HNQ traffic, be glad to be alive, and move on to the next post.

I'm not asking why some of you wouldn't, I'm asking why it seems to be so important to go out of your way to tell others to stop doing so.

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    $\begingroup$ FYI - I purged the second series of comments, but that shouldn't impact your question here since you included the text of the comments. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    May 10, 2019 at 13:38
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    $\begingroup$ This is a minor comment, but I don't think that votes due to questions reaching the Hot Network Questions list should necessarily be used to indicate quality. The HNQ optimizes for lots of things, but quality is not one of them. Getting lots of votes on an HNQ answer doesn't necessarily mean you wrote a good answer; if thousands of people read something, chances are good that even 1% will like it even if it does have a flaw (like too many images). $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    May 10, 2019 at 14:15
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh By listing (in bold) the vote counts on the posts you cite, you implicitly make that claim, by arguing that it justifies your use of images. If you're not trying to claim that, I don't understand why you draw such attention to them. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Jun 26, 2019 at 18:47
  • $\begingroup$ @HDE226868 Oh! I hadn't thought of connection between votes count and view count/hotness, but of course they are. I completely missed that; "votes due to questions reaching the Hot Network Questions". I'm deleting the previous comments, will delete this one tomorrow. Thanks for the clarification! $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Jun 26, 2019 at 22:50

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