I think DMC is alluding to his grievances with SayTwo as detailed in this thread.
ohhhh ok I’m not up on my board drama, thanks.
Me as well.
But the greater point is that in an avatar world you risk being mistaken for another person when you just leave a default letter. Of course, I currently mistake a couple dog/cat people for each other.
it’s interesting to me that several people find avatars useful and informative in some fashion. I had one for a time, it was neat and sort of fun, but I grew bored with it and took it down. Overall I find avatars have neither merit nor demerit, they simply are, mostly. The way discourse utilizes them on thread titles while browsing topics on a forum page is terrible in my opinion. But thats part of the whole”I don’t give a damn what somebody replied when I don’t even know what the op is” issue and not really part of this discussion.
Elbows, here’s what the board looks like on my iPhone Xs in Safari:
And in Chrome:
(I’m logged into the board in Chrome, so I get my preferred dark theme.)
You can see the avatars are quite legible. If I had to guess, you’ve changed the display font to be large and that’s crowding out the graphics perhaps.
I am not changing my user name to Northern Hummingbird!
That was the reason I never put any effort into trying to turn them on on the old board, with the monkeywidget thing that someone came up with.
I went to the old boards a few times without logging in, just to see what magic I was missing, and I found some of the avatars … disturbing.
That’s not happened this time around.
I was thinking Northern Mosquito.
How about Colibri Of The North?
:flees:
I feel the need to play a rant in response to these comments!
I take it back!!!
I have heard myself sing. I do not fear your…pipes.
not me personally, of course. You need to be a really good piper to do a good rant!
I mix these two guys avatars in my head all the time!
There are a few avatars that I find are hard to distinguish, particularly @carnut and @Galactus . They do just look like smears of colour to me. Maybe that’s the sort of avatar elbows is referring to.
Isn’t carnut’s avatar a bunch of Froot Loops?
elbows says all the avatars are tiny for her.
Thanks for doing the research, I think your summary is right. However, I would say that there is little distinction in practice between “avatars are for idiots” and “avatars will be the ruin of us” because in the latter case the implication is that at least a sizeable proportion of avatar users want them for bad reasons and are going to be dicks about it.
Also note how few of the objections are relevant to the proposal of it being a toggleable feature, off by default: all the posts saying “I don’t want to see X” were beside the point.
At the end of the day, not having avatars was what made the board “special”, it was “part of the board culture”, to quote Lynn_Bodoni.
We’re no longer special, folks 
I’m now really curious what settings you have. Because I mostly browse this board on my phone, and avatars are about half a centimeter, and almost all of them are easier to parse than the letters are to read. (Which is to say, I find it easy to read the letters and even easier to parse the avatars.)
You drew that? It’s really nice. You should be proud of it. It makes a nice avatar, too, as it’s a nice simple image.
Wow, those ARE ugly. No, I wouldn’t want the board to look like that.