Not sure, if this thread fits in here, so the mods can feel free to move it to a more appropriate board (Marketplace ? Services ?).
I noticed that I pay way more (subconscious) attention to avatars than I actually do to signatures. Thinking about the why, I figured out that is has to do with the sequence of eye movement and the ability of peripheral vision when reading a post or going through a thread.
Most posts are left-aligned and not centered, apart from posts in Arabic or Hebrew language of course, so you start reading a post somewhere here normally:
From there the distance to the avatar is pretty short and you will inevitably pay some attention to it by peripheral vision. You often curiously check the author of the post (at least I do) and that will put your attention to the avatar again. Now with most of the people reading from left to right and every sentence/paragraph starting at the left again, you kind of get redirected to the avatar multiple times. Check the difference for a post read from right to left, most of the attention stays right hand:
Signatures are mostly always centered under your post, so there is not a lot of natural behaviour to bring your attention to it. When scrolling through a thread, your focus always lies on the left-ish side of the thread as you want to see where a new post starts and who wrote it.
With the
post of LoyceV as an example you don't get to see the signature at all right form the start (at least on my screen); the avatar you see right away; also because it's kind of shiny compared to the other things you recognize. Add to that, that most people don't bother to read walls of text until the end and stop somewhere in the middle or scroll to the next post, it is the avatar that gets more attention than the signature.
An avatar has a lot of recognition value imo. Users that have the same avatar for ages, you can just identify by that without looking at the nick. In the threads I visit/post the most, there is a whole armada of users wearing a Sportsbet avatar and I always have trouble to distinguish between them, but I always notice their avatars and have to look at their nicks to distinguish. Or look at all the users wearing their beloved hats as avatar.
Now what is the point of all this ? It's maybe more some psychological and/or marketing topic. But with the observations of my own behaviour, I find it kind of odd that bounty campaigns pay good money for wearing a signature, but only some tip for wearing the respective avatar – if that is paid at all. And with everything being so sophisticated nowadays, the companies advertising and promoting via bounty campaigns in here, are missing out on a lot of recognition and optimizing their visibility by not using the option of a) forcing the users to wear their avatar and b) not paying equal money compared to the signature for wearing their avatar. I could even think of avatar-only bounty campaigns, which have been here in the past every now and then, but I haven't seen any for a long time.
So this is maybe just some food for thought for the bounty managers in here, but these campaigns also give some value to bitcointalk - like it or not.
What catches your (subconscious) attention when reading a post ?
