Default avatar

[Som1Lse]

I'll have to agree to @A-Man, an avatar seems mandatory. In fact, every social site I have joined so far had some kind of default avatar enabled. Some went with the logo of the forum, others have an emoticon. Those that require some sort of "real identity" (i.e. failbook, university-backends, ...) have either a stylized silhouette of a portrait shot, optionally with a question mark in front. It just gives a clear sign saying "Hey, I'm just a temporary placeholder, feel free to put your personal touch in here!"

First of all, appeal to majority: Just because all other sites does it does not make it a good decision.

Second facebook in particular is heavily designed around having an avatar next to every single post you do. If you took it away the layout would break, even if it was replaced with blank space it would look weird. The avatars on facebook also do not take up any extra space, as there is always text next to it. Same thing as far as I am aware goes for youtube.

Third like I wrote in a previous post, that seeing other peoples avatars already makes it pretty clear that you can replace it. If you really want to tell users that they can change their avatar make it a part of the registration phase, so they can optionally pick an avatar to use.

The argument that you are a bit lazy at scrolling seems to suprise me, considering that modern websites generally like to space things to ridiculous amounts. A minimum post height doesn't seem too bad, really.

It is not scrolling that annoys me; I almost always scroll to the next post, when reading a thread. What annoys me is when two posts are relevant to one another, and having to scroll up and down between two posts with relevant information to each other, even if these posts are not being expanded by an unnecessary avatar, there could easily be posts in between that take up unnecessary space due to the default avatar. It may not be too bad, but I still believe the default avatar still serves no other purpose but to take up space and arguably look cool. I have already stated my reason as to why I do not think it serves a purpose.
Which modern websites space out things unnecessarily? Just about every website I use on a regular basis have a pretty reasonable design to them.