Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

Re:Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars by awb on Friday May 28, 2021 @09:47AM (#27315256)

There are only 676 unique 2 letter pairs or 17.5k 3 letter letter initial triplets, and initials aren’t evenly distributed so there’s a ton of non-uniqueness in that approach for a platform with millions of users.

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Re:Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars by nickjj on Friday May 28, 2021 @11:47AM (#27316831)

> there’s a ton of non-uniqueness in that approach for a platform with millions of users

Sure but context is everything.

Chances are millions of users aren't all posting in the same thread / post / chat room / etc. at once. There might only be a few dozen or even hundreds of them, and the odds of hitting 2 people with the same name + similar color are really low then. Plus on top of that, some users will have custom avatars they've uploaded to make the sample size even less for running into a collision.

Google also happens to use the random color + first initial pattern too and they have over a billion users. It works, even in a busy Google Doc.

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Re:Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars by falcolas on Friday May 28, 2021 @12:45PM (#27317613)

Plus 16.7 million RGB colors, making for quite a few combinations (somewhere around 230 billion).

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Re:Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars by dequor on Friday May 28, 2021 @02:13PM (#27318688)

True,but it's a bit hard to distinguish between #ffffff and #fffffe

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Re:Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars by falcolas on Friday May 28, 2021 @02:18PM (#27318740)

It absolutely is. Thankfully we have 200 billion combinations we don't have to use while still covering every person in the world for the next hundreds years or so.

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