Might X actually be looking to revive GIF profile photos in the app?

Twitter, now X, did offer this as an option once, kind of, and a few users still have animated profile photos because of it. But the ability to upload an actual GIF as your X avatar has been unavailable in any form since well over a decade.

That could all be about to change.

A fresh post by X engineer Andrea Conway reports that the X team is at least considering bringing back animated profile images.
For now, it's just a poll, but Conway has teased various perspectives around future X features over the last year and all the ones she shared ultimately materialized in some form. So yes, this does seem to appear on the product team's radar, even though many users are pretty opposed to this option.

To clarify, X/Twitter has never really ever enabled the feature of uploading a GIF as your profile picture, but at one point, there was this bug that let users upload a GIF within certain dimensions that could then work as an animated avatar in-stream.

Former Twitter chief Dick Costolo apparently closed this loophole as far back as 2012, at which point it became impossible to upload GIFs, but those who had already done so got to keep them. Which explains why, every now and then, you see an animated profile image, even though you can't actually upload one yourself.

Some users complain that it's too distracting, and it may even cause issues for screen readers and other accessibility tools. But maybe there's a version of this where users can add an animation to their profile picture, perhaps if someone hovers over the picture or taps through to their profile specifically.

Or it could go all LinkedIn, and add video intros to profiles (which LinkedIn removed as an option earlier this year)
 
I mean, Elon is keen to take on LinkedIn in the job stakes, so maybe?
 
It's a pretty minor consideration, but it might have an impact, and it might be coming sometime soon.

But what's more interesting is that app researcher Jane Manchun Wong said X had been working on re-enabling GIFs as a profile image option in December last year. So it's been under consideration for some time at least.