The iconic egg is no more – Twitter has removed the egg as default profile photo in favour of a more standard human head approach.

The egg was initially a reference to the bird – on how new users were eggs that hatch into birds. However, over time it has came to represent a darker side of the web. According to a blog post by Twitter, while they want to encourage more self expression amongst the Twitter community, one of the largest reasons is because the egg has inadvertently become a symbol for harassment.

Twitter wrote “We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others – often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalized their profile photo.”

The egg started out as something playful, fun, cute and unique for Twitter and many users have embraced that, opting to keep that as their profile picture. However, with the new update, Twitter wants to make it clear that the default picture is meant as a placeholder, thus making it generic, universal, serious, unbranded, inclusive but also clear that it’s meant to be temporary.

The new default picture is meant to be ambiguous, including gender. Twitter doesn’t require people to specify their gender and they intend to keep it that way for their default picture. Also in place of a colourful background, the new picture is set to grey – intended to carry the feel of it being temporary and generic, giving less focus and prominence to it.