[machello13]

> was the right thing to do for end users.

Only because the company made the change anyway on a sister site, for an unrelated reason, and hadn't bothered to make the same change here.

[vlucas]

Because a 230px thumbnail is hard to see and was unnecessarily small on most modern devices and screen resolutions. It's the reason we changed it in ApartmentGuide.com too.

[mst]

"Google's stupid system reminded us to propagate a change we'd already made on another site for pure usability reasons" is not at all a bad thing but I think the general tenor of the responses here makes it clear that the blog post didn't make it obvious that was a reasonable tl;dr.

(I thought I'd read to the end but hadn't realised that was the tl;dr until I read your comments, FWIW)