Is the new Stack Overflow beta UX really useful? What is the purpose of these changes?

This whole new UI looks like Reddit. If I want Reddit, I'll go there.

You don't break what's not broken.

The beta is visually difficult to parse.

Scrolling down a page to the next answer is not simple. In Classic, Questions and Answers are visually separate from one another. There is a <hr /> between answers. There are large voting buttons and a score at the top of each answer. The user's information has a sizable box with their profile information and reputation. It's easy to visually see that an answer has ended and a new one begins.

In the beta, there is barely any indication that one answer ends and another begins. If there are comments, it's even harder to tell because everything looks the same. The posting user has an avatar and their name, in a tiny font at the start of the answer. There are vote arrows for both answers and comments nearly aligned with one another.

On a tag page (ie. Python), the community bulletin text is 1-2 font sizes to large. It feels zoomed in. It is also the only color on the page so it draws the eye away from the questions. Comparing the community bulletin on the home page, this becomes even harder to understand color and font sizes.

On the home page, the only color that exists is in icons. Why is all other color gone. EDIT: Not completely true, if you scroll down and see questions with answers there is a green rectangle for those ones.

Aside from the other items raised in other answers, I want to emphasize that the new layout is visually difficult to understand. It's mentally taxing to determine where a question ends and replies begin.

Please, Stack Exchange. I implore you. Please do not remove the old site even if you make the beta the default later. Let us opt out. I really like the old interface as is.

The new UI looks too empty, which makes the content and articles on the website feel like they were written by an AI robot. It gives me an untrustworthy feeling. I keep questioning, “Was this made with vibe coding?”

The old design was good enough. The content was compact and tight, and the colors felt comfortable and warm.

An old Y2K-era forum built with phpBB is ten times better than this new redesign. Let’s not jump on the “Tailwind UI” style trend.

This is much better than the old site but it could still use some more improvements.

• There are still some colors. It should be purely monochromatic. This way you there will be no need for a separate version for users with monochromatic screens, like e-book readers. As an added bonus, it will feel more welcoming for users with depression.
• Although, maybe we should still keep the color on ads. They are now big, bright and colorful, which means that the boring black and white questions don't distract you from watching them.
• There's too much visual noise. There should be no horizontal lines between questions. They interrupt the reading flow. It's much better designed in the answers section, when you can smoothly go between different answers and even comments without so much as realizing that you've reading something different.
• Scores should be removed entirely. Keeping them is a coward move meant to not antagonize users used to the outdated way of doing things. Let's be bold and remove the site moderation entirely, instead of dancing on just 90% removal.
• The font is still not big enough. I should be able to see only one thing at once, to not be distracted by other pieces of information that could be unrelated.

In summary, the changes are going in the right direction but they are just a step towards the edge, where they could be a brave leap.

We can debate lots of little things, but the new design's cardinal sin IMO is that it makes comments far too prominent relative to answers when you are viewing a question. It's trying to be a social network rather than a collaborative reference.

The value of a social network is divided between information and interaction, so comments and replies are comparable in importance to original posts themselves. Successful social network sites like Facebook and Twitter reflect this in the UI using threading.

The value of a collaborative reference comes almost entirely from information. Comments are ancillary; they exist solely to help contributors improve the main articles/answers. Successful reference sites like Wikipedia reflect this in the UI by placing comments on a separate talk page.

The community needs and wants a Wikipedia, but SO staff is trying to make a Facebook... and if you're looking for quality information, there is a stark difference between the two.

(Here's a thought. What if we were to move in the other direction: hide comments behind a "view discussion" link? Put the focus on the information that users are actually visiting the site to find?)

Good:

• That three boxes menu that shows products is nice and easy to use when I want to consider buying stuff, but doesn't get in the way when I don't. (I'm happiest about the "nice and easy to use" part, because I like things being organised sensibly.)
• The useless "community activity" widget is gone from the right sidebar.

Bad:

• The three boxes icon is also used for "All communities", which is hideously confusing. (Keep it for your products: we already have a Stack Exchange logo.)
• It takes 3 seconds to load each page (6 seconds for the homepage), during which time things are jumping around. With the current design, I can be in and out by then.
• The "add an answer" box is auto-focused, so when I hit Orca+;, I just get the right sidebar read – not the main document, nor the skipnav link. There's the same issue for keyboard navigation.
• Related questions are gone from the sidebar.
• Vague relative times ("asked 4 years ago") no longer have tooltips showing me the precise times.
  • Despite using the <time> element, you haven't used the datetime attribute, so I can't even add this feature back in my user agent.
• Some of the HTML is semantic, but it's giving me bad vibes.

  • I think I see what you were attempting with this:

    <section aria-label="Notifications alt+T" tabindex="-1" aria-live="polite" aria-relevant="additions text" aria-atomic="false" class="svelte-nbs0zk"><!--[!--><!--]--></section>
    

    but you should place this with the actual notifications, and you shouldn't try to wire it up to Alt+T (because it's a bad idea, and also this key combination's taken). And you absolutely should not be doing whatever this is:

    <div id="svelte-announcer" aria-live="assertive" aria-atomic="true" style="position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; clip: rect(0 0 0 0); clip-path: inset(50%); overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; width: 1px; height: 1px"><!----></div>
    

    There is no acceptable reason for this kind of thing to be here. It only ever exists as a heroic workaround for some deep-seated design flaw in a framework. Fortunately, Stack Overflow is a website, not a web app, so you shouldn't need to do whatever it is that svelte-announcer is trying to crudely (and badly) compensate for.

  • There are <meta> tags deeply-nested in the <body> (they don't work if you put them there!), apparently duplicated from the <head>.

  • Instead of <hr>, you've got this, copy-pasted:

    <svg width="3" height="3" viewBox="0 0 3 3" class="fc-black-350 m2 mt4"><rect width="3" height="3" fill="currentColor"></rect></svg>
    

    Just use CSS! That's what it's for!

  • You've deleted the microdata. While RDFa is the superior technology, these microdata annotations are what search engines use for their oneboxes: without them, some other source is going to be used for those helpful Instant Answer infoboxes. The JSON-LD block is not an adequate replacement, because it doesn't mark up the elements with the questions and answers in.

  • You've also deleted question comments.

    Since comments are supposed to be ephemeral sticky notes used as part of the process of clarifying or otherwise improving a question, hiding question comments on answered questions from read-only users makes sense in theory. If you were making a whole new site from scratch, this might be a good idea.

    However, comments have long been (ab)used for other purposes, such as providing vital clarifying information / warnings, or introductory/expository commentary to be pinned above the top answer. Hiding question comments on existing Q&A from readers – and, apparently, everyone else – is an act of vandalism.

    Furthermore… comments are used as part of the process of clarifying or otherwise improving a question. How are we supposed to make pearls from sand if you've taken away our conchiolin? If we want to help the particular querent, we'll be forced to use the answer section as a blackboard, writing and erasing as the question morphs with the querent's evolving understanding of their problem, and how best to communicate it; and all you'll end up with to preserve for posterity is a pile of chalkdust!

    Nobody wants to trawl through the results of a discussion to find their answer. That is why Stack Overflow exists in the first place.

    I have been seriously debating whether to boycott Stack Overflow going forward, but if you're going to make it literally impossible to meaningfully contribute without heavy-handed unilateral editing of other people's posts… sort of forces my hand, there, doesn't it? Please excuse my language, but you're being muppets.

Dubious:

• Reputation scores and badge counts are no longer shown beside questions or answers. (Reputation still appears on search pages, though.)

• 

  s-btn s-btn__muted is-selected has a weird modernist skeumorphism that I could interpreted as "selected", but I think that's only because I'm an (extremely untalented) amateur designer. (It's still better than Material Design.)

I'd argue there's at least some positives, at least cosmetically.

• Visited links being more appropriately styled - Nevermind... they're just a light grey on the new homepage... they're a purple color only on the old questions list design.
• Sticky left sidebar being toggleable directly rather than being a user profile setting.
• Toggling sections in the sidebar will be nice too.. once it saves your choice.
• I like that we lost the three useless boxes at the top of the home page

What I don't like cosmetically:

• Why is AI assist at the level of "Home"? it's a resource at best, put it in the resources tab.
• ai assist still isn't capable of being hidden. We know you can do it, you just did it with the side bar.
• Dark mode is too dark. I get that some people who use dark mode use it for better contrast, but that's what a high contrast mode is for. It looks lazy, like not much thought was put into dark mode short of just make the background black and the text white. The live dark mode is far better.
• The site logo looks too much like a hamburger menu. It is confusing.
• The icon below a post's score on the home page that indicates answers/replies uses the same icon for both answers and replies, they should be different because they have a distinctly different likelihood of being a potentially valuable answer vs just comments we are pretending are answers.
• The questions on the home page aren't differentiated enough from open ended discussions, make it more clear what we're getting into before we click it.

I agree, it's useless and it's ugly. I had to shrink the page to 80% to read it kind of comfortably, and it's still terrible to parse for the reasons already mentioned. Judging by other recent decisions made by the company, it seems to be a deliberate choice to drive people away and kill the site.

Reminds me a bit of a Pringles can redesign :)

I just noticed that there is no option to bookmark/save the post and any of its answers! This seems to be a deal breaker to me.

I wonder if our old saves will be retained or do I need to take a backup of the saves.

In dark mode at least the brightest color on the screen, by far, is on the answer count, drawing the eye to that rather than obviously unimportant things like the question itself, which just lurks in the soup as it no longer has any distinguishing color of its own.

edit: ah, I see: I've got a bookmark for /questions/tagged/git, on that page the question font is not bolded. Without qualifiers the questions are at least in a more emphasized font.

edit again rather than a separate answer:

There's no edit button on your own answers.

The comments are way too prominent, and are not visually distinctive enough from short answers.

Take the most highly rated question as an example: https://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array

Did you notice Daniel Fischer's answer? On my first scroll-through I didn't even realize I already arrived at the first answer, I thought I was still looking at the question body. The UI elements that mark an answer are too small and not easily identifiable.

Also, code blocks are broken for me in dark mode.

I don't think it's my browser, I don't have any other add-ons changing the site's content.

1) 404 Page

When clicking on try new site Beta on any of my answers like this answer for example, I get a 404 page. Below is the screenshot of the 404 page:

2) No edit option

I noticed that there is no option to edit of a post or any of its answers. I think being able to see the edit history should also be retained in the new version. Here is the screenshot of the new site which doesn't have edit history see option:

The fonts(or the whole screen) looks too zoomed in to me. I would rather prefer the old style. It would be good to be able to decrease the zoom in(by say smaller font style etc) manually as the zoom preference is subjective. Currently, I had to manually press Ctrl + - to reduce the screen zoom to 90%. But I would recommend making it the default. Below is the side by side comparison of the two styles(old and new):

Old style

New style