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View submission: The NewToReddit Encyclopaedia Redditica v2
A phrase used in an apology for, or accusation of an image or video being pixelated, blurry or other forms of very low quality. The exact origin of this usage is unclear but is generally credited to a comment on a YouTube video from 2008 which asked “did you record this with a potato?”. However, B3ta[1] and other digital art and meme communities have referred to the well known image-altering software as “potatoshop” long before that[2].
1: https://b3ta.com/challenge/PhotoshopUK/
2: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=potatoshop
An interesting discussion which brought up several anecdotes of people using the word “potato” to mean poor quality over the years went on here[3], again with no real conclusion for the origin of today’s usage.
The phrase has become a Snowclone[4] as internet communities dealing with audio or video often use the disclaimer “recorded with a toaster” or another contextually absurd object such as a calculator or microwave to acknowledge they know the quality is lower than they would ideally like.
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
5: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/qbb173/comment/hhu0ve1/
There's nothing here!