Today, when sharing an update on LinkedIn, I have noticed that touching own avatar in the upate edit window on iPad makes it (avatar) "bouncy" zoom in and out (let me know if there is a better word for that). At first, my thinking was that this is just an obsolete feature but after a while I started thinking that maybe this is a way to communicate no action on tap (namely that tapping the avatar does not go to the profile in this case).
I wonder what some ways to communicate lack of action can be (beside graying a button out), especially while an element is hard to modify (In this case: you would not gray out an avatar and as such it is not possible to mask the tap affordance even though it would make no sense at this very moment of writing the update, and besides of that it could lead to errors made by Users.).