How can I remove the avatar option?
-
You have a point, although I think it’s also interesting when people interact with you assuming you are another gender–you get to see how the other side gets treated. Sort of a “Black like me” experience on a teeny tiny micro scale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me
Maybe my avatar looks like she’s got a beard? It actually looks a lot like me, minus the glasses.
-
Thanks everyone replied.
@raincoaster, I meant the comments in my blog. There will always be non-wordpress users there, and also wordpress members with no avatars.
veltis’s suggestion is clever, but I think there should be an option at the Dashboard whether to show avatars or not. -
@thesaint
Am I reading you correctly when I summarize as follows – you do not want to have an avatar and further you want to have control at the dashboard so you can choose not to display the avatars of others.@veltis
Avatars are very small and my eyesight is sometimes quite blurry. I thought I saw chin hair on yours. That’s what led me astray. -
whether or not the majority of wordpress.com blogs are female, the majority of active forum members definately appear to be female.
I would guess that, in keeping with patterns across the blogosphere as a whole, a majority of active English-speaking wordpress.com bloggers are indeed female (while the ratio on inactive ‘Hello world!’ blogs may well be skewed in favour of men taking their API key and running). Women are more likely, however, to take advantage of the privacy features to keep their personal blogging out of the public eye, and not seek exposure by commenting and linking to the ‘top blogs’. This enables the men who run the place and write the A-list blogs to live in blissful ignorance of their own numerical inferiority :)
I like avatars myself, but I can see why some people might see them as ‘dumbing down’ and want to remove them from their blog. If they get enough feedback about it they’ll probably work on making them optional.
-
@timethief
Not exactly. I don’t mind having an avatar myself but I don’t want avatars appear on my blog -at the comments section. Simply because not all the commenters will have them.I see the same chin hair:)
-
@wank: Have you heard the This American Life Superpowers episode? Would you rather have the power of flight, or of invisibility? That’s what your description sounded like to me–the men have chosen the former, the women the latter. ;)
@saint: I can understand it would be more convenient to be able to just switch the avatars off, but it might take a while for them to get around to it.. In the meantime I do humbly offer my fresh-baked avatar masks in the hopes that they might satisfy in the interim.
@saint & timethief: Now I see chin hair too. Argh stray pixels! More to tweak! Nooooo…
-
Wank, I got a trackback a while back I think from Scoble’s site when the topic was about the lack of female bloggers. Someone linked to my site and said “you might not approve or like the type of site she runs but she is the top female blogger at WordPress”. Used to be. *cough* I laughed because she was praising me while also insulting me at the same time. lol So I assumed that most bloggers are men. The top entertainment bloggers that I know of are gay men. I WISH I had their humor. Except Perez Hilton. :)
-
Invisibility is not a great superpower to have if you want page rank and ad revenue ;). That said, for personal blogging, I’d choose invisibility every time. The larger your audience, the harder it gets to write.
Most male bloggers assume most bloggers are men, and most women assume that most bloggers are women, simply because the blogs you’re most likely to read and link to are the ones which most closely resemble your own. The ‘where are the women?’ debates which arise every few months tend to ignore the fact that said women bloggers are, for the most part, as ignorant of the ‘important’ men enquiring after their whereabouts as the A-list is of them. Never fails to amuse me.
-
On most blogs you can normally tell whether the writer is male or female, with obvious exceptions – Wank for example!
Cornell is a guy, except on Thursdays when I’m gay.
Someone back up the thread mentioned having gender under the avatar. Flickr has this option in profiles – Male/Female/Other. I always wondered what the “other” meant. Guys pretending to be gals? Vice Versa? Something entirely different perhaps??
It matters not a jot to me whether the bogger is male or female. If the writing is good, I’ll read it.
I wonder if TPTB have any stats on the ratio of male to female bloggers on wp.com? It might be interesting.
-
Here are a couple of Internet demographics reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It’s specific to the US, but we all know the different filters to run this through for our countries by now.
How Men and Women Use the Internet
and
The Changing Picture of Who’s Online and What They Do
I think their most recent study indicated that the average Inet user was a 45-year-old female, using it for the purpose of staying socially connected. That came out in the Spring of this year, can’t find it on the site though. It was reported on Romenesko.
-
does there anybody know if there is actually any settings for disabling worpdress avatars on one’s blog…?
-
@bentomlin
Re: disabling avatars and other function on wordpress.com blogs
I’m sorry but because we all work on the same shared multi-user blogging platform at wordpress.com this ability and the settings to “disable” avatars or any other functions does not exist. If it did then it would effect other blogs as well as your own. You can upload a white square and that’s your only alternative.However, if you feel the “disable” ability is important to you wordpress has another option. You can hire a blog host and have him or her download a free blog template from http://wordpress.org then you can import your wordpress.com blog contents into your wordpress.org blog.
-
- The topic ‘How can I remove the avatar option?’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 