Color PFPs

The purpose of this post is to make the cast for why color pfps (profile pictures) are the best pfps.

Using a real photo of yourself, especially a headshot, is pretty obviously not the move. Most people on Twitter figured this out over the last 5 years. Your pfp is the most widely seen element of your online identity, in addition to your name and handle. You don't want as many people as possible recognizing you by your face and legal name. It is much better to have people know you by a privacy-preserving pseudonym (even if that's just your first name, like me). Even if you have photos of yourself on your personal website or something, simply not having one as your pfp gets you most of the advantages of pseudonymity. Because far less than 1% of the people who see your pfp will ever go to your personal website. Less than 1% will even make the 1 click it takes to see your full Twitter profile. There is a huge difference between being default doxxed and being doxxed in a way that requires a single act of effort. Your pfp is your maximally advertised, public-facing identity. If you care at all about privacy, don't make it your face.

Cartoon animal pfps and other things like that are fine for privacy purposes -- just as good as color pfps. But the problem is that they over-influence people’s perception of you. Even if you think the monkey with glasses is a pretty accurate representation of you for one reason or another, too much of even an accurate thing becomes inaccurate. pfps are "too much" by default, because of how prominent a part of your profile they are relative to everything else. Anyone who sees your pfp over-indexes on it in terms of their perception of you. So if you have an ape as your pfp and you tend have intellectual takes in your tweets, even those who know you will think of you as an intellectual ape, not just an intellectual. You’re as much a part of the group as you are an individual. And even if the group/tribe you are associating with has no widespread reputation or you are not associating with a tribe at all, these characters influence people’s perception more than they should.

With color pfps, there is no baggage. There are no assumptions. For better or worse, you’re judged on your content and your content alone. That’s it. And that's the way I like it. A pure color is not cute or scary or representative of being rich or counterculture or a crypto og or anything like that. It’s just a color. There’s nothing to it. You could argue there is some feminineness to a pink or maleness to a dark blue, sure, or some warmness or coldness to certain colors, I guess, but that’s about it. Those are some very high level things. Regardless of what color someone uses, you still have basically a blank state for your perception of that person. And to the extent that pure colors pfp would gain the same kind of group reputation I say is overly influential above, it would be like an “anti-group” group reputation. As in, the group reputation would be that people with color pfps are really just individuals. Color pfps are pro pseudonymity, pro individuality, and pro being judged on what you say, not how you look.