I’d also find it waaaay easier to track conversations and build models of “who is who” with avatars. A guess I have that hasn’t been verified is that a lot of people on LW might be opposed from a “people would start to use their avatars for signalling purposes” angle. I’d be open to hearing more of that side, but currently I think I’d be for avatars.
I should have posted this comment here and rephrased it, sorry:
I also note that avatars could use tricks to solve various constraints I’m imagining the LessWrong team might want to impose.
For example, if you think avatars might make the comments section too visually interesting you could render them in greyscale, or with muted colors. And if you think they might lead to people playing weird games with their avatars (I don’t think this is likely, but I can imagine someone worrying about it), you could let users choose from a small collection of acceptable-to-you, auto-generated images based on a hash of their username.
np, yeah that small amount of brainstorming from you has updated me to “even if we don’t do [pick whatever image you want] there’s still probs a way to get the visual stickyness”.
I’d also be super interested in the results of a study on ability to recall/track individuals in a thread with their head-shots vs autogen images.
I’d also find it waaaay easier to track conversations and build models of “who is who” with avatars. A guess I have that hasn’t been verified is that a lot of people on LW might be opposed from a “people would start to use their avatars for signalling purposes” angle. I’d be open to hearing more of that side, but currently I think I’d be for avatars.
I should have posted this comment here and rephrased it, sorry:
np, yeah that small amount of brainstorming from you has updated me to “even if we don’t do [pick whatever image you want] there’s still probs a way to get the visual stickyness”.
I’d also be super interested in the results of a study on ability to recall/track individuals in a thread with their head-shots vs autogen images.