Map Enthusiasts

Who cares?

Well, you should for starters, since you're the one making a post about it. There are a LOT of different things those two images could represent, even IF we take them at full face-value as presented.

NK was bombed to Hell and back during the Korean War and many areas being bombarded into the ground tend to undergo blackout procedures to make it harder to hit important targets or civilian populations. Perhaps they've simply relaxed those procedures recently (even though, in most of their rhetoric, the war continues on) since it's been a few decades since the last carpet bombing run was attempted.

Maybe, as you suggest, there has been a massive increase in urbanization within the last ~10 years and everything that showed as pitch darkness before was sparsely populated or living in abject squalor and couldn't afford/weren't given access to the electricity needed to keep them on all night. But maybe now they do and everyone is happy all the time and it's not even like they live in a repressive state where elections technically happen, but there's only ever really one option

Or maybe, as another user pointed out, the required buildings have already been sitting there for some time and only recently been instructed to have the lights on 24/7 to give the illusion of progress because someone got a little embarrassed when the first image made the news and everyone made fun of NK for appearing to be one of the poorest nations on Earth.

And what about the very likely event that parts of the images are indeed altered in some way? Maybe it's something minor like just rotating them to line up properly, sure whatever. What if NK HAS improved some infrastructure but visible areas of SK and China have developed twice as much within the same time frame? Whatever work NK has accomplished would look pitiful in comparison if that were the case.

And why stop there? What if there's actually LESS overnight light than there was however many years ago. What if that original image wasn't photoshopped per say, but just happened to be taken on a night where the whole country experienced sweeping blackouts (minus Pyongyang because nothing bad can ever happen there)? Or the updated version was taken on the night of some big cultural festival and the entire country was celebrating together in those specks of light?

My point is there are, like I said, A LOT of different possibilities that one can draw from just showing a set of "Before/After pics" and YOU as the person presenting them should have at least some answer for the curious beyond "Who cares?" Not only does that make you look bad but it lowers the importance of whatever it is you're talking about and subsequently lowers the audience's willingness to engage, to care. Am I expecting you to provide down-to-the-millisecond records of when each was taken, the diameter of the camera lense, or some convoluted third unreasonable request? No, of course not. But I would expect you to be at least a little ~~knowledgeable~~ actually no, just CURIOUS enough to go and look for some info if asked. Even if it's just a 30 second Google search, that's still better than essentially telling the audience to go fuck ourselves