[Paradigm]

We've just attempted this on v2 and it's a nice approach however far from practical. On first load of a thread with five replies it took 17 seconds to load the page.

Perhaps when you hover over it does this or would that not make a difference?

It would still need to load the image causing the delay.

Or just lazy-load the images.

That's a good idea but I think it would still take quite sometime when scrolling causing a stuttered image load. I'll test this out and let you know.