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.

  • Gustephan@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    171·
    3 days ago

    Avatars aren’t info. They just clutter the screen. They very, very rarely are interesting. At worst, they show something inappropriate. They require moderation. They don’t match any aesthetic of the site.

    I literally didn’t know they were supported and never see them anyway.

  • Foxlore@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    When I first set up my account I could not find where to add an avatar (I didn’t really look that hard) I figured I would get back to it later and only remembered about it from this post.

    • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Yeah same. Does Connect even have a setting for that? I mean I won’t use it; I guess I never bothered to look is all.

      • sibannac@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        There is a setting. The profile pictures are so small in list view, you can’t really tell what it is.

    • moodymellodrone@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      26·
      4 days ago

      Yeah I put avatars on my early Lemmy accounts, but then switched to Voyager. Now I don’t care because you don’t see avatars on Voyager anyway. Plus I kind of like the old school pre-social media feel.

      I think it’d be nice if apps could let choose show or hide avatars in the settings.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      I’m still on Sync for now and same. But I don’t think I saw them even on desktop…?

    • SatyrSack@lemmy.sdf.org
      97·
      4 days ago

      Wow, I cannot even find a setting to enable it. I used to have a very high opinion of Voyager, but I am finding recently that it is missing a lot of features.

        • SatyrSack@lemmy.sdf.org
          6·
          4 days ago

          Sure, it’s just that in the early days when we started getting more Lemmy apps than just Jerboa/Lemmur, Voyager tended to be on the forefront of adding new features not found in other apps. But nowadays, as the landscape of Lemmy apps has matured, Voyager has fallen behind as its philosophy seems to be stuck at “be a clone of Apollo”. It is by no means a bad Lemmy app; it is just no longer at the same relative level compared to other competing Lemmy apps.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        11·
        4 days ago

        It’s built on the ethos of Apollo. Apollo’s dev had no interest in supporting avatars because they make for a shitty, cluttered experience and I FULLY stand by that decision.

  • marzhall@lemmy.world
    13·
    3 days ago

    Heck, I was salty when the old site added avatars. I already ignored names and was weirded out by “popular redditors” culture before avatars, and it was annoying to see a logo next to a name coloring my perception of the comment. I’m here to read comments, not to look at avatars