I imagine they’d be visually distracting and take up page space, but if it’s considered that the civility benefits of having available faces attached to names are significant, there’s ways to mitigate that- have a user’s avatar or profile picture appear when rolling over a user’s name, for example, instead of being displayed on every comment whether you want to see it or not. Or some similar solution for making them immediately available but unobtrusive.
I imagine they’d be visually distracting and take up page space, but if it’s considered that the civility benefits of having available faces attached to names are significant, there’s ways to mitigate that- have a user’s avatar or profile picture appear when rolling over a user’s name, for example, instead of being displayed on every comment whether you want to see it or not. Or some similar solution for making them immediately available but unobtrusive.