New auto-generated user card background is very distracting

AI-generated summary

seanblue expresses concern over a new auto-generated user card background feature on Meta, which they find distracting, especially on dark theme. They highlight examples of overly bright and poorly suited backgrounds, including one that is bright pink, and argue that the change should be reverted or made optional. They request a user setting to disable seeing these backgrounds for all cards and, at minimum, to disable the auto-generated background for their own profile.

I’m generally not a fan of user card backgrounds, as I find them very distracting. I can’t stop other users from setting them, but at least many users don’t bother or thankfully don’t choose overly distracting backgrounds. However, it seems that (on Meta at least) there’s a new default, auto-generated user card background, which means now everyone has a background, some particularly bright or otherwise poorly suited as a background especially on dark theme. Here’s the one generated for me for example:

Up until now I’ve been fine just using the default pink S profile picture on Meta, but making the whole background brink pink is awful. Other colors aren’t as bad, but aren’t great either. For example:

And for good measure, here’s a non-default but still very bright example:


Personally I think this change should just be reverted / not released to all installs. (I have no idea if this was intended to be enabled for all installs or only as an option.) If it is released to all installs, could we get a user setting for this? Ideally a setting to disable seeing these for all user cards (since for me my primary issue is that the bright backgrounds on dark theme are very distracting), but at the very least I’d want to disable it for my own user card since I don’t want an auto-generated background based on my profile picture.

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Usercard Redesign Experiment