The Twitter egg is dead – so can you crack the perfect profile picture?

The site has ditched its default avatar after it became synonymous with trolls, replacing it with a shadowy head and shoulders. Surely we can do better than that ...

Regular Twitter users are likely to have experienced the anticipatory glow of a notification, signalling the start of an illuminating conversation in which conflicting points of view are debated calmly and politely, or maybe the birth of a new friendship, or a clever bon mot that makes you chuckle quietly to yourself for the rest of the day. Or perhaps an apoplectic egg is screaming at you. "CLEARLY you don't AGREE with DEMOCRACY!!1!" it says, then says it again, in a slightly different way, for the next 12 hours.

But the Twitter egg has finally cracked. Over the past few years, the default profile picture - which was introduced in 2010 as a way to illustrate that a new user was about to "hatch" - has become visual shorthand for trolls, bots and fury. It has now been replaced by a shadowy head and shoulders, which is supposed to feel more temporary. At least you'll be able to imagine that it's a human being behind terrifying conspiracy theories about fluoride, rather than your breakfast.