Why do, relatively, so few of you set an avatar for your profile?

because it doesn't matter at all

On Voyager I can't even see avatars or custom usernames

I don't see avatars in my app and I don't really care to. Never had them in early reddit and that's what I'm trying to replicate.

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

There are avatars?

Lemmy has avatars?

My reader doesn't even show avatars

My what?

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.

Lemmy is a place I prefer to be as anonymous as I can while still participating so I don’t set one for myself and I use voyager the vast majority of the time so I don’t see anyone else’s. I personally don’t find profile pictures/avatars add anything to the experience for me.

In voyager your can’t see avatars. A lot of people use voyager.

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.

I think many use apps that don't show avatars. I usually browse lemmy with Eternity and sometimes forget they even exist.

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.

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.

There are avatars?

Why do you bother with an avatar for your Lemmy account?

We can set avatars for profiles? I don't even see avatars.

Most clients dont show them

Because it's stupid and pointless

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.

Neither the apps I've used or the web-end I use on my PC seems to make use of avatars at all.

I'd set one if there was a point, but there isn't.

I didn't even know there were user avatars. Most common apps don't show them.

Because I don't care about it and it makes no difference. They only show in your profile and I don't look at my profile. The only people that do look at your profile are the people going there to try and find something to use against you.

I don't care enough

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

I hid them to keep the comment section clean looking

I disable avatar display on all my clients. Reddit and it's siblings like Lemmy have historically been less person-focused than other websites, and many of us like to keep it that way. While it can be neat to recognise people, I only need their user handle to do so and I only check if necessary. It's nice to take a comment at it's value without regard for who said it. Reddit's push towards personifying their users is part of why I left.

I would first need a personality to express.

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.

You see my user name - that's all you need. You want more info? I've got a comment history you can see too. Why do I need some visual component that I can change when I've got an unchanging name until I decide to abandon this account and get a new one.

Would block avatars if I could, don't want to see people's vanity, just the words.

I can't imagine any scenario which I'd want to use one.

It is irrelevant.

Because I dont care.

I do not see the importance of an avatar.

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 @Kolanaki@yiffit.net 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.

Because a lot of people don't see a benefit in being recognized when pseudonymously interacting with strangers. And in some apps they aren't displayed at all.

I had no idea Lemmy even had avatars until I read this post. So I went into my profile out of curiosity - even though I already had "Show Avatars" checked, I've never seen a user's avatar on here before. I did upload one for my own profile though for the hell of it.

I don't even see or care to see avatars. Its just clutter imo.

Can't be arsed.

I'm not sure how to, and it's not something I care about enough to figure out how. I generally think of posting here as more shouting into the void, so I don't care very much to personalize my account.

I use Sync. I may be missing out on the perfectly simple UI that was developed to do this.

I don't see them on the third party app i use

Tbh I keep meaning to add one but I'm also a wicked procrastinator

I don't even see it on voyager. I don't know why I would want an avatar anyway.

I've put in as much effort to my profile as I wanted to. Sounds like a lot of others did the same.

Because it's an anonymous website?

I thought that they were dumb on Reddit and I think they're even dumber here.

With 21x21 avatars, the question is why even have this functionality in the first place. That size is too small to matter.

Hadn’t really thought about it until you asked. Don’t see why it’s worth the bother.

My app either doesn't show them or it's off by default. I didn't know there were avatars but I'm not interested in them either since I'm reading on my phone and prefer a minimalist view.

You guys have avatars?!?

If I care enough about another user to note them across time and communities, I give them a tag.

In the other direction, I don't expect anyone to recall my username from one thread to another, to build any sense of my broader personhood greater than one interaction provides.

An avatar just seems unnecessary. I'm also on an app that only displays them if I go out of my way to see them.