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Hat tip to the evil growth marketing technique (source long lost, sorry) suggesting use of a default female "outline" avatar to strongly motivate account creati
by j_s 9y ago
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/rethinking-our-default-profile-photo.html 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.
- lasserafn 9y agoI'm a little sad that I didn't do this
- homero 9y agoNow I see why the top of https://giphy.com/gifs/homer-simpson-the-simpsons-bush-4pMX5rJ4PYAEM https://giphy.com/gifs/homer-simpson-the-simpsons-bush-4pMX5... and it made me click it
- Kiro 9y agoWhat is this referring to?
- wastedhours 9y agoNot 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.
- lasserafn 9y agoWow, I expected something else. That is actually interesting!
- wingerlang 9y agoAnd/or that the service seems to have more female participants?
- wastedhours 9y agoThe 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.
- superasn 9y agoI'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.
- lasserafn 9y agoIn 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.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoCould analyse any name/username given to determine most likely gender and set it to the opposite.
- lasserafn 9y agoAbsolutely, 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