[btrettel]

One disadvantage of the minimal customization approach is the difficulty of knowing who is posting what at a glance. Avatars seem to help me a lot on this. Here at HN I've had to make an effort to read the usernames, which are in a grey font smaller than the main text. This makes it harder to differentiate between people. In the past, I've replied to comments here not realizing who I was replying to. On a phpBB-style forum, if I find that I'm repeatedly replying to someone then I'm likely to pay closer attention to that person and maybe even become friends with them. To me, one of the values of a forum is building relationships, and if people are less distinguishable then this becomes more difficult.

I first realized this after this recent HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175151

I agree that too much customization brings the focus on irrelevancies, but no customization (beyond a username) isn't right either. One compromise would be to allow avatars of a certain size but nothing else (signatures, flairs, etc.), but this becomes difficult with threaded comments. Lobsters has tiny avatars but they seem too unobtrusive.

Relatedly, StackExchange has randomly generated avatars, presumably to get around the problem of some people not customizing, but they aren't memorable.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a really good point. I've learned over the years to pay attention to and remember HN handles, but it's nowhere near as easy as it's with avatars on forums. Text nicknames don't hash as well as images.

I don't know what would be an improvement for HN. Adding images would ruin the aesthetics and make it worse for people with bad connections (of which we have surprisingly many here; the other day some people were reporting they're browsing HN from the middle of the sea!).

Wrt. customization on forums, I always found avatars to be constrained enough. Signatures were where problems started, because while usually limited in character length, with bbcode/HTML/image embeds, they were of unbounded size - and like GP mentions, often much larger than the comments themselves.

[btrettel]

I like the HN aesthetic and wasn't making recommendations for HN per se. I think threaded comments seem to conflict with avatars. There might be a way to have something like avatars that's inherently lightweight, not requiring some people to disable avatars like you can do at some forums. SVG avatars come to mind but would probably be accessible only to a small number of people. Emojis might work but I don't like them.

Incidentally, the non-standard capitalization on your username has drawn my eye before, so your username is more recognizable and memorable as-is. I frequently enjoy your posts.

[fomine3]

What about to auto-generate tiny profile image(like GitHub) by HN username?

[btrettel]

I've never found those memorable. On the GitHub project I've contributed most to I can vaguely recall who has and does not have a user-specified avatar and what that looks like, but I can not recall any details of the auto-generated avatars for other people.

[btrettel]

Sorry, this post was unclear: I can recall who has a user-specified avatar and roughly what that looks like, but for those who don't have a user-specified avatar, I don't have any recollection of what the automatically generated avatar looks like.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, automated avatars to me look like they're perfectly optimized to be as unmemorable as possible. They have no distinguishing features, there's literally nothing in them that my brain could latch onto.

At this point, if I had to design automated avatars for some board, I'd probably download a bunch of these silly Machine Learning image sets with 10 000 images of frogs, or something, scale every picture down to 64x64 or 128x128, and assign one to every user at random, or based on a hash of their username. I'm pretty sure this scheme would yield avatars that have all the benefits of autogenerated ones, and are also infinitely more memorable.