especially on light mode, that dark red is pretty close to the default text colour, it really blends in

that and the lil preview area still shows the image i picked even though it was not accepted, which made me think it went through fine. if i click save, see the page "reload" (i think it doesn't actually but it jumps back to the top which feels the same), and my image is there, to me it looks like it went through fine

agreed. multiple posters have found avatar uploading confusing, so you're definitely not alone there.

lemme think on it and maybe look around to see how other sites handle avatar uploading. i am by no means a designer, so that's why it's so bad 😭