The Internet Fries Twitter For Crushing Its Notorious Egg Avatar

Twitter has long been notorious as a cesspool of abuse, and that’s been tied, in part, to its default egg avatar. This is, of course, because people who want to say mean things on the internet are big and tough but also don’t actually want their names tied to their terrible behavior. So Twitter decided to solve the problem. By getting rid of the avatar.

To answer the obvious question:

https://twitter.com/hutchinsane_/status/847856239107334146

If it’s a joke, it’s an unusually knowing one from Twitter. The goal, they claim, is to encourage users to drop the default avatar for something with more character, to make accounts with nothing to contribute less visible in a literal sense, and also, of course, to distance themselves from “Twitter egg” as a synonym for a person who types in all caps and whines about people having the nerve to exist.

Some, of course, pointed out this wasn’t exactly going to solve Twitter’s problems:

https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/847843709957931010

https://twitter.com/UltimaBlues/status/847848852044603393

https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/847844031065460740

Others mourned, or raged, the loss of their avatar:

https://twitter.com/DarkUchiha420/status/847854495501627392

But, really, in the end, it’s just a default picture, and users are already reviving it. Copies of it are already spreading like wildfire on Twitter, so the eggs will be with us a while yet. And, changed avatar or not, it’s unlikely the abuse will be gone, either.

(via Twitter)