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That’s odd because there’s this super famous book in the US, it’s called How to Win Friends and Influence People. One of the main points in the book is this:

Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

You can replace this with

Remember that a person’s avatar is, to that person, the sweetest and most important image on the Internet.

So seeing your avatar in the lists after you post, even if you have no idea who anyone else is, is still valuable. The sweetest image…

I think there are two reasonable counterpoints:

  1. I can see the argument that on a huge, massive, epically large, really busy Discourse instance with hundreds of thousands of users there’s no way for people to really keep track of each other, like New York City. In that case every topic will have the full complement of 5 avatars, so you can’t use it as an activity indicator as much and (well, I guess depending if you hang out in very narrow categories and subcategories) you are not as likely to know the people there.

  2. Certainly new users won’t know anyone. So other than “how busy is this place” and “how many topics have real conversation with 5+ people in them” – which I’d argue is quite important information – the value of the avatars is diminished versus someone who stops in regularly. Note that new users get the /top page by default which does suppress avatars and shows users the “greatest hits” so it kinda solves this problem on the first visit anyway.

The 5 avatar design default may indeed be weak for large sites and for very new users, but it optimizes for small and medium discourses with moderate to low levels of activity. I think that’s correct. I think that represents what the vast, overwhelming majority of Discourse installations will be for the forseeable future.

The 1-5 avatars next to each topic do provide a lot of information at a glance – about people. That’s appropriate, because discussion is made of people. At least, the last time I tried to have a discussion with the same person over and over it didn’t go so well…

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