MBlume comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong

82 Post author: Alicorn 05 January 2010 09:32PM

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Comment author: MBlume 08 February 2010 08:33:47PM 3 points [-]

I can't find it now, but I read a study where some form of antisocial behavior [...] became less common when the victims could see the perpetrator [...]. So joining a faceless and pseudonymous community should be a perfect recipe for disregard of niceness and other cooperative instincts.

So should we add avatars to LW?

Comment author: Alicorn 08 February 2010 08:50:07PM 8 points [-]

I think they'd be visually distracting; LW isn't otherwise full of pictures. Additionally, a lot of people using avatars on the internet apart from Facebook do not use their own faces, or even real faces that don't belong to them; if I attached a little picture of a unicorn to my name, would that have the same effect?

Comment author: komponisto 08 February 2010 08:44:05PM 4 points [-]

So should we add avatars to LW?

Please, please, no!

Comment author: Benedict 10 August 2014 04:23:07PM 1 point [-]

I imagine they'd be visually distracting and take up page space, but if it's considered that the civility benefits of having available faces attached to names are significant, there's ways to mitigate that- have a user's avatar or profile picture appear when rolling over a user's name, for example, instead of being displayed on every comment whether you want to see it or not. Or some similar solution for making them immediately available but unobtrusive.

Comment author: thomblake 08 February 2010 08:46:36PM 0 points [-]

So should we add avatars to LW?

Absolutely. At least support Gravatar.

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