This would be an easy thing to do and everyday occurrence if we had proper, first-class-citizen transclusion [1] mechanisms as part of the Web standards and their implementations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_imple...

That's fair, and true from an engineering perspective. I imagine for YC it comes down to, as with nearly every other company, a prioritization problem.

With the exception of companies like FB with millions of users, the priority of creating a css/html rendered version of text to prevent people from having to click through to copy is quite low.

I suppose I'm defending the image as being the more useful of the two "easy way outs" that are likely to be implemented. :)

It does fit easily with the (admittedly terrible) ubiquitous trend of sharing posts between social networks through screenshots.