They are actually smaller than 1/2" on my computer screen. But they are perfectly clear and legible and I find claims that they are hard to see curious. Mijin’s avatar is quite clearly the face of a black dog with a white muzzle and blue eyes.
Do the people who claim the avatars are illegible simply have poor eyesight? Because I have no idea how otherwise they are hard to see.
Most of you got to pick your avatars? Wow! Discourse just assigned mine to me.
Thanks for the nice words. After those nice words, I feel drawn to reinstate my pink avatar. It’s just a bunch of flowers. The Heffalump avatar was less successful. I could barely make it out myself. I’m not happy with the pink either, but until I can find something better, I’ll leave it at that.
I will say that people’s ability to change their avatar at will is one of the downsides to them. For people who do rely on them, it can be confusing.
I’ll try to remember this the next time I want to post something more hateful than normal. A quick avatar change, and I’m completely blameless. 
I’m 60 - have worn glasses all my life, and bifocals for probably 10 years. I can read your text perfectly. I readily admit my vision is not perfect, and I’ve been thinking about scheduling a new appt.
Your avatar is a face. With an eyebrow raised. For whatever reason I have the sense it is a fantasy character or something.
Enlarging it - is that Elrond? I think so. Only reason I’m not sure is that I really disliked and never rewatched those movies compared to the books.
I just realized that if I put A VERY LITTLE effort into it, I can make most of them out. Thudlow’s - I just passed over as some B&W squiggles. Now I see it is Hobbes doing something. And apparently the word BONK.
Einstein’sHund - most likely a dog made up to look like Einstein.
But I’m not interested enough to enlarge either or try to look closer.
IMO, SO MUCH of what crosses my screens is unimportant noise. I have developed a great ability to ignore that which is unnecessary. Unfortunately, that likely impairs my ability to do some things w/ my tech - but I have no desire to do those more than I’m doing w/ them, so no great loss.
Trasparent GIF works too. Here’s one at that’s somewhat permanently available:
I think they made it by scanning a very small thin pane of clean glass.
You’re welcome, avatar luddites.
Love your username. Great song.
And in the process created an avatar that I can see.
I get people who are indifferent to them. I get people who find them distracting. I don’t understand so much hostility to them that someone would go out of their way to create an anti-avatar (and have that backfire from some of the themes).
Don’t tell me what I can or cannot distinguish. The vast majority of avatars are pretty discernible to me.
I can’t even figure out how avatars could become cliquish.
All the cat avatar people think they’re sooooo much better than the dog avatar people but you know what? They’re not.
Yup! You got it. It’s Elrond from LOTR. I wear glasses too, I didn’t mean for my comment to sound disparaging, I just don’t have any trouble looking at an avatar and seeing what it is. I’m not sitting close to the screen either.
Here are a couple of quick ones for you if you want to try them. Or not. I think they should be scaled down to avatar size.
Thanks for looking those up. The pictures are really cute. I’m just not sure they render well as avatars because of the tiny details. I’m going to try them out for a bit and see if it grows on me. Sorry GreenWyvern. . . gotta go with the namesake.
Your Heffalump and Roo avatar works very well on my screens. I find it appealing. Thanks for trying it out. Hope you keep it.
I flew through my last sight test, but I still browse at 125% text size or even 150% on my laptop screen.
Ctrl + mouse scroll wheel.
Hope one works out for you. I don’t want you to feel you need to use one just because I worked for hours and hours over a hot Paint app to make them. Avatars should be personal so go for whatever you like best.
Try this one. It’s a higher resolution version of the same image and it has an alpha channel. It still has issues with tiny details, but it might “pop” a bit more. You might also try cropping it to just the two character’s faces (eyes, eyebrows, mouth) in the frame. You don’t need the whole bodies to infer the species or character of these two.
e.g.
I’m struck by the same thing. I wonder if it’s a difference in settings, or screen resolution, or eyes, or brains.
I pretty much see all the avatars. Even Piper’s mosquito. It’s not that i peer at then and enlarge them, i just see them. And i do like them, and find they help me recognize posters. I find it hard to imagine being able to read the letters of a post without also being able to see the avatars clearly.
And yet a bunch of people don’t. Makes me curious.
I just tried switching to Desktop View on my phone and the avatars are still plenty big.
Dunno why you’re apologizing! 
I liked the previous Heffalump avatar, and I like this one even more. The pink flower avatar not so much.
I wonder if they haven’t enlarged the text on their computers somehow, without enlarging images.
Enlarging the pages in a browser would enlarge everything, but perhaps it’s some unusual Windows text setting, or accessibility setting, or some app.