Twitter launched NFT profile pictures — people are hella mad
Who moved my NFTs?
Hiccups and reactions
A lot of people, including Elon Musk, thought that this limiting functionality is annoying, and it’ll make people with hex avatars a bit more entitled. The Tesla chief thought Twitter should spend more engineering talent in blocking crypto spammers. Why should he? He has beenscammers’favoritepersonalityto impersonate.
Other users are just irritated by this new change.
Programmers have even started building bots to block anyone with a hex profile automatically.
Even NFT advocates weren’t really impressed. It was frustrating for people not usingan iOS device, as they couldn’t set their pre-owned NFTs as profile pictures. iOS exclusivity for a feature is bad form for a company as large as Twitter; there’s no good excuse for excluding Android users in 2022, even if it’s temporary.
Hours after the rollout, OpenSea’s APIs — a popular NFT marketplace —were down,resulting in some Twitter users with NFT avatar having blank images display as their profile pictures.That’s a real bummer.
Plus, there were concerns about the verification of NFTs. As a user,Adam Hollanderpointed out, that as Twitter just checks if an NFT is linked to your wallet, it’s hard to differentiate NFTs that are part of an exclusive collection at a glance.
Before Twitter rolled out this feature, a ton of folks hadpopular NFTs, such as those fromthe Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, as their avatars.as their avatars. But there’s was no way to tell if they are genuine NFTs or just JPEG images of them.
The social network’s new feature will let you click/tap on a hex picture to check various attributes of NFTs, such as the token ID, blockchain type, and what collection it belongs to. You can see an example in the screenshot of these details below.
People are also creating templates for hexagonal profile pictures, so you can make your regular avatar image look like an NFT one. So, the onus is still on the user to click on a profile picture, and read through the details to identify if an NFT belongs to a prestigious collection. That’s too much work.
Twitter’s response to this is rather interesting as they are calling it an easy method to verify NFTs:
If you’re an NFT owner who doesn’t own an iOS device or don’t have Twitter Blue subscription, a tool calledShow My NFTwill randomly update your profile picture on the platform from your collection.
While more people are purchasing, or trying to understand NFTs,the company’srollout wasn’t ideal or inclusive by any means. It has to figure out many cultural and technical caveats to make this a more acceptable feature across the board.
Twitter’s not the only social network looking to link NFTs to profile pictures. As the Financial Times noted last week, Meta is working on features that will let usersshow off their NFTsthrough profile avatars on Facebook and Instagram.So this trend is not going away anytime soon — but here’s hoping it dies out faster than dalgona coffee.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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