In comment sections or in community pages, it’s mostly an ocean of default avatars.
As a UI developer, that’s always been a gripe because I put a lot of effort into making them look good and scale properly, etc. When I see 60-70% or more accounts sporting the default avatar, it makes me wonder why I even bother.
So, since this bugs me so much, figured I’d just ask.
Lemm.ee users I can understand because of the waiting period for uploads, but AFAIK, most instances don’t have that restriction. Even then, there are plenty of .ee accounts that never bother to go back and set one.
Avatars are a psychological trick useful for building up sunk cost fallacy and making a user more likely to personally identify with a product. I don’t have social media avatars for the same reason I don’t have “nabisco” tattooed on my asscheek.
I didn’t even know there were user avatars. Most common apps don’t show them.
Because I hadn’t even thought of it.
On Reddit, it changed to something semi-unique and, even though I never changed it, I somehow identified with it.
On Reddit, it changed to something semi-unique and, even though I never changed it, I somehow identified with it.
That’s what Tesseract does; pseudorandom avatars based on the actor ID if the profile hasn’t set one. But those are just local, though.
Lol, here’s what it generates for yours:
because it doesn’t matter at all
Why the fuck would I ever want to do that? I don’t even want people I know knowing who I am.
Keep my name out ya goddamn mouth — Will Smith probably
I don’t care about mine or anybody elses avatar, also profiles with avatar usually are: selling something (OF) or company profiles or bot accounts, so any account with an avatar is kinda sus to me.
So I should start an OnlyFans? You could watch me garden, read, and yell at the TV during hockey games. And occasionally fix stuff.
brb gonna post space pics to onlyfans now
As a UI developer, that’s always been a gripe because I put a lot of effort into making them look good and scale properly, etc. When I see 60-70% or more accounts sporting the default avatar, it makes me wonder why I even bother.
You could just do those autogenerated things instead of a static image if they haven’t set one. Like, hash their username and use the bits of the hash as an input to some function that procedurally-generates an image. Makes it easy to visually-identify users without needing them to go out and manually create an avatar.
I don’t really care much about the visual appearance myself, but I did want something unique to make it easier to visually-identify my posts for other users. Humans can identify color in their visual field in constant time, so having different colors for different users is helpful. I plonked “wave swirl”—the first thing that came to mind—or something like that into Stable Diffusion 1.5, got a picture of a wave, haven’t touched it since.
EDIT: For a good example, I always easily identify @[email protected] comments, as he’s got custom colored Unicode in a display name and a custom avatar and custom background. I don’t care enough to go do that myself, but it does highlight the fact that it can be useful for rapidly-identifying people in a conversation.
For those who can’t see avatars, he looks like this in the Lemmy Web UI:
I’ll add that I don’t personally really like the display name functionality, because I need to refer to people in text using “@” syntax—as I did above—by their real username and it makes it slightly more obnoxious to get that, but I do have to say that it does help make users visually unique.
I think that my ideal for user identification would be maybe some sort of procedurally-generated flag as the default. Those are designed to be readily-identifiable at a distance already. Like, use the hash bits to choose one of several different groups of flags (triband, etc) and bits to choose the color of various elements in the flag. If one flag isn’t enough to consume all the bits in the hash, maybe do two side-by-side, etc.
EDIT2: Hmm. Now I kind of wonder if that should be done client-side, because it could let the viewing user theme what they’re seeing. Like, dark-mode people don’t have to have bright flags, if someone wants a specific theme they could use that (a string of different colored cats in different poses), etc.
EDIT3: And I loathe the fact that the Lemmy Web UI by default permits animated avatars. I think I disabled animations somewhere in Firefox specifically because of the people on here using animated avatars. I think that not putting the kibosh on that was a huge mistake.
I’m just gonna reply to your edit separately lol
I’ll add that I don’t personally really like the display name functionality, because I need to refer to people in text using “@” syntax
Haven’t used Lemmy-UI in forever, but the user search does work on display names, though the one you mentioned with the custom Unicode characters definitely wouldn’t (well, not typing the letters they represent anyway).
You could just do those autogenerated things instead of a static image if they haven’t set one.
Yeah, it already does that. I’m using the Dicebear adventurer pack for users and the initials pack for communities. Each user gets the same pseudo-random one generated every time.
I’m the opposite of another commenter (the one who said they find profiles with avatars sus). I find the ones who don’t bother to set anything a bit sus myself. Like, it’s as if they don’t care to be here, they don’t plan on sticking around, just here to hit it and quit it, etc. Taking the effort to put something there at least shows they’re trying to be part of something (well, in addition to other factors).
Even though I tend to comment somewhat frequently, I prefer to be just “another voice in the crowd” I don’t really want to be more easily recognized lol
That’s fair.
I mean, the reason I have a picture should be obvious, I’m literally going for visibility with a name like this…
But 9/10 times it’s a generic name with a default or no picture.
With the low adoption rate of avatars they realy stand out compared to places with default avatars where they all blend together.
OMG it’s Asafum everyone! Here he is! Wow!
Nailed it
You sunuvabitch, I’m in!
I think this platform is less about people and more about commenting. That’s also why we can’t even subscribe to people on Lemmy, just communities. So naturally, your profile ends up being less important. And I have close to no incentive to care about avatars. This place is more or less just about the text content and the links. And I don’t even want my real face to show up next to my stupid comments.
I mean developers add avatar to all kinds of things, whether that’s useful or not. I myself don’t need one in Spotify or the fitness tracker app or my computer user account. They’re there nonetheless, and once you implement them, you have to deal with the UX representation. I think some users like to customize stuff so it get’s implemented. But it might be meaningless to most of us.
Piefed is so nice. It’s like Lemmy but you can subscribe to anything activityhub. Including user accounts.
I think this platform is less about people and more about commenting.
I kind of don’t like that attitude, but looking at the state of things here, I can’t say it’s wrong.
Not that everyone who has set a profile image is an angel, but at least it helps things not be a stream of faceless opinions. Just my thoughts, so take that with a grain of salt.
Sure. And since Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, it is embedded into some context… I mean we also connect to services like Mastodon with a very different approach. And we have things like Mbin with a hybrid approach. And as mesa said, Piefed tries to do some additional things as well. But the way Piefed currently handles missing avatars is to just not show any, it’ll just be the username as text aligned to the left.
(And I think the stream of faceless opinions is part of the idea behind Lemmy… Whether that’s a good or bad thing, or could be improved.)
And I think the stream of faceless opinions is part of the idea behind Lemmy
Definitely think “bad thing” considering the trolls and shills we’ve had to deal with here, but that topic is far outside the scope of this “Ask” post lol.
Yes, that’s likely a longer argument. I think I’m not completely considering it a bad thing… I think the old time forums had some charm to them, where you’d just contribute something to a discussion, no matter what and who you are… It’d be just about a certain topic. But that’s not really what we do here. So it’s a bit out of scope. I feel we could do that, though. The technology and set up of the platform itself should allow for those kinds of conversations… Bus yeah, it’s complicated. And this might be more social media than internet forum.
I’ve put in as much effort to my profile as I wanted to. Sounds like a lot of others did the same.
Hadn’t really thought about it until you asked. Don’t see why it’s worth the bother.
There are avatars?
Yep. Check your profile settings. Apparently it varies by app, but Lemmy-UI, Photon, Tesseract, and a few others have full support.
I use Voyager
That being said, I agree with most others and don’t like them anyway; I just had no idea they were a thing.
I also use voyager; never seen avatars, didn’t know they existed.
Boost doesnt have avatars either
Would block avatars if I could, don’t want to see people’s vanity, just the words.
None of my reddit accounts had avatars either. I would get banned so quickly it didn’t make sense.
If it seems like Lemmy is a more welcoming place, I might make the effort. Not sure yet.
I’m lazy.
You actually have an avatar, lol, so you must not be that lazy haha.
😉
Are you referring to people’s profile pictures as avatars? Otherwise I have no idea what you mean.
Yeah, profile pictures. In the API data, they’re called
avatarso that’s the term I tend to use.They are oftentimes refered to as the same thing. Avatar came around first IIRC (it was generally an avatar of who you are, not what you actually look like) and slowly morphed into profile picture as social media took over and people forgot about the whole “don’t give strangers your personal information” thing.
I still use avatar personally. Older term for same thing
I’ve always considered an avatar to be a sort of pseudo persona rather than just the thumbnail attached to an account.
