[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.