Regardless, people have come to associate the circle head with masculinity, and because of this association, we felt that it was important to explore alternate head shapes. We reviewed many variations of our figure, altering both the head and shoulders to feel more inclusive to all genders. 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. We chose grays because they feel temporary, generic, and universal. With that, we included a higher contrast color combination to make this image accessible for those with visual impairments. Because of its coloring, the new profile photo also gives less prominence to accounts with a default profile photo.
Twitter ditches default egg profile photo
"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 wrote in the blog post. "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."
Twitter ditched its iconic default egg profile picture for a more generic gray silhouette today, as first reported by Fast Co. Design. It's another controversial move for the platform after yesterday's revision to the reply function.
The new silhouette is meant to "[highlight] the absence" of a profile photo, as Twitter's design team found that the vibrant background colors of the egg didn't capture the fact that something was missing.
All new Twitter users start with the same profile picture: a white cartoon egg on a colorful background. But over the years, the images known as "eggs" have gotten a pretty bad rap. They're often associated with Twitter trolls (though not ALL are), as people often create dummy profiles for the express purpose of harassing other people, and don't change the default settings.
The company says it settled on gray for the new images, as opposed to the bright colors that accompanied the egg profile photos, for a particular reason. "We explored gray, generic images to communicate that this profile photo is intended to be temporary," it says. After settling on an image of a person's figure, the company analyzed ways to keep the figure inclusive in terms of gender.
Of course, there is no suggestion changing the appearance of the avatar will discourage trolls from abusing others. Twitter has acknowledged it has a major issue in the amount of users who use the platform purely to engage in this kind of behaviour, and has introduced a raft of new features in recent months, including the ability for users to block certain keywords, such a swear words or racial slurs, and to mute users with default profile pictures.
"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."
While many online trolls would gravitate towards an image from popular culture or other subcultures, the default egg avatar is still one of the most frequently seen profile types and has been extensively analysed.
On Friday, Twitter introduced a new default profile picture, switching from the well-known egg to a simple human silhouette. Twitter hopes this change will encourage users to replace the default image with a real photo of themselves, dissuading people from remaining anonymous or being associated with trolls.
That's according to a new piece out from Bloomberg's Polly Mosendz, which took a deep dive into Trump's Twitter following. What Mosendz found was that Trump's Twitter following is largely made up of eggs: users who never changed their profile picture to a more personalized image and were stuck with Twitter's previous default image, an egg.
Egg accounts have long been associated with bad behavior on Twitter. While they're not necessarily always trolls or automated bots, egg accounts often get a bad reputation on the site for being perpetrators of harassment and bullying. Last month, Twitter attempted to curb some of that behavior by ditching the egg for a new default image: a silhouette of a disembodied head and shoulders, aimed at encouraging people to "upload their own photos for more personal expression."
"This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which is not fair to people who are still new to Twitter and have not yet personalised their profile photo," Twitter wrote in a blog post.
"This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which isn't fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven't yet personalised their profile photo.
"This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which isn't fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven't yet personalised their profile photo. 2ff7e9595c
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