Twitter Ditching Default Egg Profile Photos Because They’re Tied to “Negative Behavior”

[Megalith]

Looks like another April Fools’ story—wait, it’s real. Twitter thinks that their egg avatar has been tainted by its worst users, as many of them tend to perform shenanigans without changing the default profile pic. But what is turning it into a faceless head on a gray background supposed to fix, exactly?

If you want to harass your fellow internet denizens on Twitter, you’ll have to do it without the cover of an anonymous egg in your profile photo: The social media site says it’s doing away with its default avatar, partly because it’s become associated with online harassment and other bad behaviors. The original idea of the egg photo was a reference to Twitter users hatching from their default profile with brand new baby Tweets, the company writes, but things have changed. One problem with the ovule is that it’s come to represent “negative behavior” for many users, and Twitter doesn’t want to let that prevent new users from expressing themselves.

 

[Chance_P]

so now I have to change my profile picture to the egg after I create a new account to do some trolling? ughz

 

[Spidey329]

To be honest, April 1st is the best day to release controversial changes.

If you get significant backlash, you can always pull the "April Fool's" card and takebacksies.

Heck, Google did a double fake years ago by announcing Gmail as an April Foolsesque alternative to Hotmail. The press pumped it as a joke, but it turned out to be a real product launch. Who's to say that some of their other stuff wasn't real, but didn't get the popularity they wanted so they pulled the April Fool's card.

 

[Prisoner849]

So they decided to associate a different default avatar with negative behavior.

Time to face the truth and start using the trollface as a default avatar on the net.