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.
because it doesn’t matter at all
For something like Lemmy or Reddit, any posts or conversations that I have are generally going out to random people who also happen to want to engage in a particular discussion. I don’t even look at usernames. The next conversation that I have will likely be with completely different people. In other words, there is no sense of community (unless I were to become heavily invested in a single community for some reason), and therefore I have no reason to want to make myself stand out in any way or make it easier for people to recognize me.
On the other hand, for something like an old school forum that I would frequently post on, or a discord server or something, I might actually get to know people and develop a sense of community. In that type of situation, I feel like an avatar can be appropriate.
My what?
The fuc is op about lmao
We’ve got Avatar’s now?
My literal first reaction was “we have avatars?”
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.
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.)
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.
My reader doesn’t even show avatars
Lemmy has avatars?
Almost every app for Lemmy I have tried does not even have them visible by default and require you to manually turn them on. If their only experience is using an app, they might not even know you can have an avatar.
Why do you bother with an avatar for your Lemmy account?
because i need everyone to know i am a lion
Why can’t you just tell the truth for once? You don’t always have to be lion.
i have to be true to who i am, after all, I have my pride
If that’s your mane point, then I guess it’s acceptable.
I can’t imagine any scenario which I’d want to use one.
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.
One of the harsh lessons in software is learning that users sometimes have different wants and expectations than the developer. Gold-plating is a constant temptation, and it usually leads to frustration and resentment.
At the end of the day, if 60-70% of people don’t care, either do it for the 30-40%, or do it for your own enjoyment, or put your efforts elsewhere. In any case, don’t fall into a pit of resentment just because lots of users are approaching a platform differently than you.
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which is so dumb by the way.
I think I read a few months ago in their repo that it’s being worked on, but does not seem so.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
I forgot.
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.
