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Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Hat tip to the evil growth marketing technique (source long lost, sorry) suggesting use of a default female "outline" avatar to strongly motivate account creation / gender reassignment (and perhaps even replacement with genuine profile pictures)!

Edit: Twitter recently discussed changing default avatars, in part because their default was often left in place as "fun and cute": https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...

My main point was that default avatars can drive sign-ups motivated primarily just to change it.

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In regard to latest edit with Twitter

I think it's interesting how much thought goes into default avatars, and that it can be used as a marketing tactic. Thanks for providing link to Twitter as well. Guess I'll have to think more about it in the future.

Now I see why the top of https://giphy.com/gifs/homer-simpson-the-simpsons-bush-4pMX5... and it made me click it

.. I still don't get it :D

Oh, the avatar is a girl

What is this referring to?

Not heard of it before, but my interpretation is:

For a service where the early adopters are predominantly male (perhaps an invalid assumption, but a lazy tech stereotype), you have the default picture be the outline of a female to incentivise the male to "correct" the default by uploading their own picture (demonstrating they're a male, rather than female).

Interesting thought process if my interpretation is correct.

Wow, I expected something else. That is actually interesting!

And/or that the service seems to have more female participants?

The OP was referring to an "evil growth marketing tactic" - it wouldn't be as evil if it were mainly for empathy with the user base rather than as a dark pattern.

I'm just guessing but maybe that if I see a female avatar for my profile I may be motivated to change it with my own profile image? not sure though.

I'm a little sad that I didn't do this

Could analyse any name/username given to determine most likely gender and set it to the opposite.

Absolutely, I've played around with this. There are tons of open source libraries to determine gender from name. Obviously it cannot be 100% correct, but it can provide a guess

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