Twitter drops the egg avatar, supposedly to combat abuse

Twitter’s default egg avatar is the signal that the user who owns that account hasn’t uploaded a photo yet. It’s an integral part of Twitter’s identity. But it looks like Twitter is shedding this part of their image for two reasons. One is they want to replace it with a silhouette icon to encourage users to upload profile photos of themselves. Another is to combat abuse. Yes, you read that right. Twitter thinks since abusive accounts usually don’t upload profile photos and have the egg profile picture there is now “an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior.” While we don’t think that’s the actual solution to the issue, Twitter thinks it is. What they are doing though is taking out something that has been heavily identified with the service, which we think is a mistake.

Source: TechCrunch