Just noticed that Stackoverflow has a new front end in Beta. I do not like it, however I slowly begin to fear im just another boomer. :( What do people on here think about it?
I think the beta looks just like any other weekend project with cookie cutter elements. There is nothing to differentiate it from other sites that are made after 2020. Current design is also way more concise Im not sure when we started using the whole widescreen for a website. Sure wasted screen estate is unfortunate but long mouse travel times are also uncool.
From the recent changes it's obvious what they want to achieve. They want to abandon the traditional Q&A model in favour of a Reddit style forum. This is in line with the recent addition of opinion based questions, as well as the upcoming removal of close votes and review queues.
The UI itself is awful, the dark mode is way too dark, and the answers look too similar to the comments around them (just like on Reddit), so it's difficult to scan the page for answers. Why they decided that all comments must be expanded by default is beyond me, it takes up so much vertical space for something so irrelevant. The meta info on answers (score, accepted, poster, etc) is not prominent enough. The new design uses too little colour.
This question shows the problem quite well: 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?
Tap for spoiler
I don't think the new design is ugly per se, it's just less usable and less visually distinctive...