Twitter has officially said au revoir to its default “egg” avatar in a bid to disassociate itself from online trolls.
Since 2010, the default avatar for new Twitter users was a profile picture of a white egg on a solid colored background—a playful reference to Twitter’s bird theming.
While some people kept the default profile picture because they thought it was “fun” and “cute,” according to a blog post circulated by Twitter’s R&D team, over time the egg came to mean something completely different: it became a symbol of harassment.
Many users who use the platform for the sole purpose of harassing or abusing others while preserving their anonymity never take the time to personalize their account, it said. And because of these few bad apples, there is now “an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior.”
So on Friday the social network announced it would introduce a new default profile picture to “prompt more self-expression” and distance itself from anonymous trolling.
The new default profile photo (a generic head-and-shoulders silhouette) was designed after carefully studying the signage of gender specific bathrooms, Twitter’s design team explained, with a view to make the avatar as inclusive and “gender-neutral” as possible.
According to Twitter, people have now come to associate the round head pictogram often as avatars with “masculinity”—although technically, nothing about the pictogram’s design indicate that it’s a man—so they felt it was important to “explore alternate head shapes.”
The new figure has narrower shoulders and a more oblong, less round head.
The move was met with skepticism by many users who initially thought the March 31st announcement was an April’s fool day prank.
Others simply sneered.
“I would, uhh, I would rethink that,” one developer wrote in response to the“Rethinking our default profile photo” post.
“@design Evil has a new face. pic.twitter.com/09P5YohkvO” wrote one user in reference to the new avatar.
“Twitter says egg avatars were being associated w/harassment. Instead of working on harassment, they changed the avi,” tweeted Jill Pantozzi “This is like, a comedy at this point.”
Cracking the egg was apparently part of the company’s anti-harassment strategy.
Earlier this month, Twitter added a new filtering function to automatically block tweets from accounts with the default egg avatar in an effort to crackdown abuse on the platform.
But as Tech Crunch’s Fitz Tepper points out “an abusive tweet is an abusive tweet, whether it’s next to an egg, a silhouette or a real person’s avatar.”
A design revamp won’t keep the trolls away.