There seems to be a tendency to want to make LW look more like "The Rest Of The Internet", full of avatars, signatures, icons, and other "exciting" visual clutter. I really hope we can resist this natural-descent-into-entropy. The "purely functional" visual simplicity of the design is integral to the beauty of the site. For example, I could really have done without the recent substitution of icons for text buttons, which makes LW look increasingly like Facebook or something. Every once in a while, somebody proposes avatars, and I panic.

There is no reason LW needs to resemble other forums. In fact, I think I'm probably not alone in actively not wanting it to do so. But if we don't want it to do so, then we need to actively resist, because there is apparently an automatic tendency in the other direction.

I was ambivalent about Kaj's proposal, but I think I'm pretty firmly opposed to this. I don't want to know what people look like, and I don't want any more "personalization" of posts beyond distinct usernames and writing styles. Even these are already enough to introduce plenty of undesirable status-signaling games (I understand that there are some people here who actually use software to block usernames!); can you imagine what will happen if people start associating themselves with images and "funny quotes"?

Simplicity. Uniformity. Anonymity. These are virtues.