The general concept is called an identicon.
I like the first-letter concept that Discourse uses, but think it should be combined with a more geometric background. I like the Github style; they look like Space Invaders to me. But some combination of letter-geometry would probably be preferable than either one alone.
There were next to each other in one of the “mini-lists” next to each topic. I doubt I would have ever noticed otherwise.
I did the right-click, “view image info” to confirm.
Interesting. @ALOHA_HATER and @Arcite have the same color code as the subjects of the current discussion.
I realized I was looking in the wrong place for the color code. I just checked in GIMP and the three do share the same color.
I haven’t done any research on the color distribution or the color generation.
As I mentioned above, the icon-generating API can produce ~16M different possible colors. Of which humans can see the differences of about 10M colors and typical modern hardware can display about 5M colors distinguishable by a human. What I haven’t dug into is whether Discourse’s user-onboarding system chooses the colors from a much more restricted palette.
e.g. it’s good bet that lots of the very light grays bordering on off-white are not used since it’d be real hard to see the white letter against a nearly-white background. They might well also choose a “chunkier” minimum increment of color in each channel. e.g. instead of 256 possibilities for each of R, G, & B maybe they only use 26 or 16 possibilities. The goal being to avoid almost-indistinguishable icons. But if they did use, e.g. only 16 values per channel suddenly there’s only 16^3 = 2^12 = 4096 distinct icon colors actually used. I don’t think it’s actually that restrictive, but you get the idea.
Next time I’m bored enough I’ll dig into the code & see. If anyone else with the skills wants to preempt that effort, go for it!
That is Ok by me.
This is correct!
Not exactly on topic but @Lucas_Jackson and LHOD used to have the same picture of Cool Hand Luke, tho I think they were mirror images. And I just noticed that former mod @Bone has the Son of Man for an avatar and there is another poster that uses it now, but I’m blanking on the name.
With trillions of pics available, I always find it amusing when the little niche like the Dope doubles avatars.
Icons aren’t unique but snowflakes are.
Topic edit suggestion for the mods (I was gonna mention the topic owner, but this topic is old enough that edit protection has probably kicked in.*)
Is every user avatar icon unique?
Icon isn’t specific enough IMO 
* users at trust level 2 and higher do have a longer allowed editing period after composing their post, but not all the way back to August 2020!
I don’t know about every other icon, but I feel rather unique, but that could just be my perception of reality and those around me.
//i\\