Why do, relatively, so few of you set an avatar for your profile?
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.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.
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.I didn't even know there were user avatars. Most common apps don't show them.
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I've had the same one since I started, though I did change it when someone customized it for me - it was too good not to use.
When I took over 60s through 90s music communities, the first thing I did after removing the apostrophes from the display names was set icons for them. lol.
That's valid lol closest I have is the one I'm using at the moment. I've made a couple ones for myself but that's about it. I've had more than enough memes made about me (which is surreal enough as it is), so I'm good lol
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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.
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.Gonna chime in here and agree that its because its because I never see anyone else's or mine, even on the website
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They are just so small idrc about others so I dont bother to put one
I have one because I finally found a fun pic that was mostly round so it with fill up the avatar bubble enough to still be distinguishable what it was. Most are way too small to make out what it is, and not intriguing enough to click to the profile just to see it slightly larger.
If mine didn't serve slightly as a promo for my community, I'd likely still have the default.
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.There are avatars?
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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.
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.
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.Would block avatars if I could, don't want to see people's vanity, just the words.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.Hadn’t really thought about it until you asked. Don’t see why it’s worth the bother.
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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).
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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
.eeaccounts that never bother to go back and set one.You sunuvabitch, I'm in!
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On Voyager I can't even see avatars or custom usernames
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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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
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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.
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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).
