Sorry about that. I think my original message came off harsher than I meant it. You make good content, and your profile pic updates are only a minor annoyance to me.

It’s not that I don’t recognize you when you change it. Same face, obviously. What I think gets to me is that it commands my attention. Like an advertisement in the middle of a video. Something I have to look at and assess. It takes me out of the flow of what I was doing.

I block video ads by paying to upgrade on every platform that supports it. I avoid watching media with ads that I can’t pay to opt out of. I’m looking for the same opt-out here.

Aside: Someone brought up a good point which is that the profile pics are themselves out-of-band. They’re just links. It’s the HTTP server that actually determines the displayed bytes, and that server can optionally serve different content arbitrarily.

So even an option to ignore updates wouldn’t necessarily freeze the profile pic on the recipient side. It takes cacheing at the byte level as well.

Really I should stop complaining and just write my own client.