Twitter is finally making some changes — just not the ones we asked for.
On Friday — following the unveiling of its messy new replies feature — rather than making strides against the noted hate speech problem on Twitter, the social media platform revealed it would changing its iconic troll default egg avatar to some weird AF other thing. Great.
The little egg avatar, a classic sign of a bot or troll account, has been transformed into a new design that's presumably supposed to resemble the outline of a human's head and shoulders. But instead, it kind of just looks like one tiny, deformed egg hovering above one half of a slightly larger egg. Twitter announced the change in an overly detailed blog post on Friday.
One of the main complaints, of course, is that rather than simply changing the appearance of the avatar so often associated with harassment on the platform, Twitter should be taking more active steps to fix the problem.
Change the default user pic from an egg to vague silhouette, THAT is going to solve the harassment issue and finally make Twitter profitable
— Tom Summerville (@the_vesperian) March 31, 2017
Me: This site is a hideous avalanche of hate speech and death threats from Nazi Twitter eggs
Twitter: that's terrible. let's change the egg— Eldritch Costello (@acekatana) March 31, 2017
As you can imagine, with the death of the Twitter egg so close to Easter, many users were also feeling emotional about the loss.
And as is customary with most new features, people had a lot of jokes to make. Thus, the sad new grey image was mercilessly trolled on its very own site.
The hilarious Darth Twitter account had a field day with the new design, creating alternate heads and topical comparisons to items like spring Starbucks cups.
RIP eggs, you will be missed. Now, about that harassment problem ...