Inside Twitter’s Obsessive Quest To Ditch The Egg – Fast Company (Mar 31, 2017)

This has some of the background on why Twitter today replaced its famous egg avatar for users who haven’t chosen their own photo with an outline of a person, but the most interesting part is why Twitter is doing this now. My first reaction on reading the piece was that this just means all the negative stuff trolls do on Twitter will now be associated with these head-and-shoulder outlines rather than eggs, this move was clearly designed to take effect after Twitter had taken several actions to curb abuse and harassment on the site, such that the new avatar could potentially start life without those negative associations. The logic is certainly sound, but it feels like this happened just a little too early in this transition. A few months from now, if Twitter’s various changes have indeed curbed abuse, that would be the perfect time to make this switch, but right now there’s still little evidence of that and people’s negative associations with anonymous accounts (regardless of the avatar) are still far too fresh. Much better to have waited six months and seen results from the abuse curbs before unleashing this new blobby avatar.

via Fast Company


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