Twitter Egg Icon Traded For A 'Placeholder,' Genderless, Gray Avatar
Twitter is ditching its egg icon profile photo and is introducing a new gray, genderless avatar, the social media platform announced in a blog post Friday.
The previous egg default icon was a “fun and cute” way for people to create accounts without their own photo, Twitter said. However, users used the egg picture to not show their faces and engage in online abuse.
“We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others – often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts,” Twitter said. “This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalized their profile photo.”
The new profile default photo looks like this:
Twitter hopes the new design will help “prompt more self-expression,” and encourages people to upload their own pictures, since the new default picture looks more like a placeholder.
To choose the new default picture, Twitter looked back at all of its default profile photos throughout the years:
The social platform then made its decision based on a set of traits including generic, universal, serious, unbranded, temporary and inclusive. The company also took the figures of the avatars into consideration.
Twitter especially looked into bringing inclusivity into the default profile photo, so people don’t specify their gender on the platform. The site especially looked into the avatar’s head shape.
“We reviewed many variations of our figure, altering both the head and shoulders to feel more inclusive to all genders,” said Twitter. “When the shoulders were wider, the image felt overly masculine, so we decreased the width of the shoulders and adjusted the height of the figure. As a result of these iterations, we ended with a more gender-balanced figure.”
Twitter said it chose the color gray for its final picture because it feels generic, temporary and universal.
Read: Twitter Banned Accounts: Platform Suspends More Than 636,000 Extremist Users
The default picture change comes after Twitter announced Thursday it will allow users to send replies to other accounts without counting the username in the 140 character limit. The changes also follow numerous efforts from the social media site to curb online abuse, including a partnership with IBM to use its AI technology Watson.
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