You can turn the damn things off? Roughly the equivalent of me asking: “Do you mind if I don’t smoke?” 
By your logic, I should be able to say “Poster X really annoys me. She is such a cunt” and not get banned. Because “she” couldn’t refer to Poster X, because that’s against the rules, so I must have been talking about someone else.
I’m Shot From Guns, and I approve this message.
ITT: Morons keep coming in after having not bothered to fight their ignorance on the subject, thereby making the same retarded arguments over and over again that are completely and demonstrably wrong.
1.) Offensive avatars would be disallowed, in the same way that offensive usernames are not allowed here. If you think the latter are allowed, I encourage you to demonstrate that this is the case by attempting to change your name to Niggerkiller Shittypants. Ideally, I’d challenge you to create an account with the same and see how fast it would get banned, but socks are against the rules, so that option’s out.
2.) If you’re worried about seeing offensive avatars, you can turn them off. And the board will look 100% exactly like it does right now. Except with fewer threads discussing avatars, because those of us who would like them will *have *the damned things.
I’m not just worried about seeing the avatars. It’s the people. If there are potential posters out there who will just not post on a message board that doesn’t have avatars, then I would prefer that they continue to be denied the opportunity to use avatars, because we are better off without people who are that fucking shallow.
See now, where I come from the words “makes sense in context” have meaning.
And you forgot to call me Moron.
I have a rock that prevents tiger attacks that I’m interested in selling you.
Oh great, another one. Let’s see how many Hitlers we can cram into this clown car!
Ah, so I’m just making that one up, then?
Either avatars will encourage morons to join the board, in which case we don’t need them, or they will not encourage anyone to join the board, in which case we don’t need them.
To recycle examples from upthread, the absence of avatars hasn’t exactly kept shallow doofuses off FreeRepublic or 4chan.
Of course avatars aren’t the only factor. If a board is dedicated to philopsophy, you’re going to find discussions on philosophy there whether they have avatars or not. It’s not just magically going to turn every poster into a drooling retard. Naturally you’ll find discussions on science on a science board, astronomy on astronomy boards, et cetera. On freerepublic and 4chan (which I’m pretty sure does have avatars anyway) you’re going to find a huge amount of horrible posting by complete idiots, because those forums are specifically dedicated to idiotic discussions.
The real question is; would the quality of the discussions, on those boards, have been of a different quality if that same board had been with/without avatars? I don’t think it’s a particularly big factor, but at the same time I think the answer is undeniably “yes, a forum without flashy images, lolcats and page long signatures after every post does invite a somewhat higher level of discourse”.
It’s not *my *argument.
And I’ll refer you to Steve MB’s examples of the kind of great communities you get when you don’t use avatars. Clearly, not allowing people to enable avatars by their own choice keeps out the riff-raff.
Steve MD’s examples are irrelevant. There are other variables at work in those cases.
Why? You already posted several examples that suggested otherwise.
1.) We’re discussing avatars, not signatures. I also think this forum is a lot better without requiring us to kill a Jew after every post we make, but that isn’t relevant to the discussion, either.
2.) The answer is not undeniably yes, as you would know if you’d participated in this thread long enough to read the posts from anyone who disagrees with you, versus just masturbating all over the thread with your own WAGs.
3.) I think that enabling avatars here would have approximately zero impact on the *quality of the discourse *on the board. What it *would *do is give people another venue for expressing their personalities (in addition to the current option of usernames and signatures), and, IMO more importantly, give those of us who are visually focused a better way of keeping people straight.
You’re no fun.
The people who are objecting to enabling avatars are inherently selfish. *They *don’t want them or need them, so they don’t want *anyone else *to have them. I think someone made the analogy upthread to smoking, and I think that’s pretty valid, given how terribly poisonous these people apparently think avatars are. I don’t want to make *you *smoke; I don’t want to make you inhale *my *smoke. I just want to be able to smoke in my own fucking home, and for *my *friends who *want *to smoke in my home with me to be able to do so.
ETA:
Sorry, Tom, they’re a limited commodity. We’d either have to stop after the first couple million posts or set up Jew farms.
That wouldn’t work. We’re not very good with tools.
Oh, pshaw with the drama queening. This isn’t your home. It’s a proprietary message board.
I think you may be unclear on the concept.
On the plus side, you’d be getting laid way more often!
Really? Really?
And the point about using my “home” as the place where I was smoking is that it emphasized that it has no affect on you unless you *choose *to be there.
Nobody’s asking for animated avatars or huge sig images, and only a few said they’d like to see inline images. I think most of the pro-avatar Dopers just want to use small, static avatars. I use static 80x80 and 5KB max on my board, with no complaints about clutter, loading times, or a perceived flavoring of the discussion.
And again, the serious high-level “mental masturbation” threads many think are so prevalent on the SDMB really aren’t. Even without avatars, there’s still plenty of threads like this and this; far more than threads deconstructing Derrida or contemplating a feminist epistemology of mathematics. Yes, Dopers as a whole tend to be somewhat more articulate, mature and verbose than what you might see on the majority of message boards, but that’s mostly due to demographics The median age of a Doper is going to be 10 to 20 years higher than Offtopic or General Mayhem.