Twitter replaces egg with genderless head and shoulders icon

boing
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Nope:

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Did you mean Cockatrice?

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Did someone say basilisk?

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I think it is beautiful.

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But now the trolling isn’t branded by being directly associated with Twitter’s bird theme, so it’s not a problem anymore! Besides, it’s not like trolls will ruin the implications of new users with this new default icon too…

/s

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Just because photons bounce off of me doesn’t mean that that phenomena is who I are.

And I think head+shoulders icons look daft, like a graphic designer swallowed to many Playskool figures in their younger years. Combine with the XP Fisher-Price theme for maximum effect.

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Hey, go for it. Just don’t put too much effort into it, like I didn’t.

Actually, mine is an armless robot that I created while playing with Inkscape one lazy afternoon. Happy mutants are not featureless eggs. Nor are vaguely depressed robots.

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Mmmmmmm…no effort… thanks man!

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Twitter replaces egg with generic Twit.

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So, let me get this straight - they noticed that there’s a huge problem with harassment, and that because harassment often comes from accounts with egg avatars, people associate the new-user egg avatar with accounts made for harassment.

So, instead of, oh, I don’t know, doing something about the harassment, they just changed the default profile picture to something that wasn’t associated with harassment, because it was unfair to people with default avatars.

Good work, Twitter, fantastic, really getting to the heart of the problem there, top notch. What’s next, ending world hunger by replacing the word “hunger” with “tummyrumbles”?

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I love it - Twitter diehards (if there is such a thing) will intentionally use the egg in an effort to be, what, old school I guess …

But I think the overall move is a good one - anonymous driving trollies / hateful behavior by mass users is obviously an epidemic, and the move to the new icon will probably have a psychological effect. (Or one hopes, at least.) Plus the new icon looks more like Facebook, which is whole different level of unpleasant.

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Can’t see the resemblance. My head and shoulders are connected.
I believe it to be a Magritte homage.

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ooof wow that is ginormous, sorry

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35

…words fail me.

Twitter is the worst-run tech company on the planet and I am enthusiastically waiting for it to die. It makes anti-harassment noises (Trust And Safety Council… what a farce vaguely redeemed by the amusingly Orwellian name) but won’t give actual users the tools to deal with it themselves. Proper filtering! Automated blocking! Nice transparent and configurable. Hell make it programmable and then people will write scripts that implement whatever behavior is necessary.

[[Full disclosure: I have the egg avatar or, rather—now—the genderless, neckless, faceless, hairless, shapeless Avatar of the Future. I’ve never harassed anyone on Twitter and have, in fact, never tweeted @ anyone I didn’t know in real life, I don’t think. ]]

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While this change is… odd… to say the least, Twitter has also been regularly engaging in mass bans of trolls with a recent purge that was huge, they’ve been working on ways to track and block trolls who get banned and use a new disposable email address to sign up, changed some algorithms to drop trolls to the bottom of replies (which has helped defang Trump’s Twitter account), and have been doing other work on various fronts to ty to manage harassment. It’s not like this change is the only thing they’ve done. This change is well worth mocking for what it is, and the recent threading/reply changes have some regressions well worth griping about, but they have been been gaining some ground on the trolls with recent changes. They’re cheap lazy bastards who won’t pay mods and instead just try algorithmic fixes to human problems, are still far too forgiving due to their moronic “the free speech wing of the free speech party” idea, and that’s well worth griping about, but we should keep our complaints centered in reality.

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You can turn off notifications from people with default avatars now, too.

So you’ll still get the abuse, but at least you won’t know about it unless you go looking.

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How 'bout this?

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They should replace it with like… Rupaul or something. Don’t we all love Ru?

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