As others have expressed, this fills me with dread:
However, please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design.
(Also as others have expressed, burying this fundamental aspect of how the site works half way through a post that claims to be about "new site design" - with an implication that it's mostly cosmetic - feels like you know it's going to be unpopular, and were trying to hide it.)
I can see one of two ways this will go:
- The site becomes garbage. Finding good questions becomes near impossible because there are so many posts that are either off-topic or so poorly written that they add no value.
- The community expresses its view of posts which would have previously been closed in another way - probably downvotes. This is much more harmful, both in terms of being confrontational instead of collaborative, and also losing the value of "closed as duplicate" posts which allow multiple representations of the same basic question to lead to a single place for good answers.
My guess is that it'll be a mixture of the two - and given the company's current track record, I can imagine that the next step to prevent the second outcome would be to remove downvotes, making the first outcome even more severe.
Currently, this is on my profile:
So I've visited every day for over 15 years. Whether I'm on holiday, travelling etc - I've still made a point of visiting, commenting, answering (less often over time, but not for lack of wanting to answer) etc.
If this change happens as described, I strongly suspect that by the end of 2026, I won't be visiting every day.
The opinion of the meta community at least is really clear here. Please, please change course.