this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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Web Development

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New beta Stackoverflow frontend. Hot or Not? (media.piefed.social)
submitted 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by vogi@piefed.social to c/webdev@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] Lauchmelder@feddit.org 1 points 27 minutes ago* (last edited 21 minutes ago)

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...

[–] hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip 1 points 45 minutes ago (1 children)

they look like they’re gearing up to sloppily it if the UI is an indication

[–] Lauchmelder@feddit.org 1 points 19 minutes ago

It has already begun. You can browse meta stack overflow and see how all the recent announcements posts have several hundred downvotes. The removal of the chat entry barrier, opinion based questions, now the redesign, native ads, ... it has all been awful, the community responded accordingly but they just push through with it anyways. And they wonder why they're losing users...

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Screenshots of both:

| "Classic" | "New" | |

|

| | | |

Well, you can see I use dark color scheme, which apparently got lost. Make a guess how much better I like that.

It's not my full monitor width because of vertical browser tabs, but even then the horizontal distance between left nav bar and top right nav toolbar is horrendous.

The spacing is wasteful, the sizing is unnecessarily big.

It's worse in every way. Less accessible, less readable, less scannable, less overview.

I wish they would simply drop their new design draft completely.

For anyone visiting the site thinking "looks like before for me" like I did, at the top there's a link to "try out the new site".

Their blog post, research blog post, previous community feedback, feedback form.

[–] vogi@piefed.social 3 points 3 hours ago

I really don't understand why they even did that? Guess the web devs got too bored while the current one worked too well, but that should have maybe been a sign to keep your hands from it.

You don't even need to be a designer to see how it looks worse even if you are not able to point out what exactly is wrong.

Especially do not get why they got rid of the borders for the sake of minimalism. It adds so much unnecessary mental overhead.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 3 points 5 hours ago

That's so ugly it hurts to look at.

Why is there so much empty space? The visual design is attrocious, the columns are just randomly placed without any thought, margins or symmetry.

It looks like it's incomplete? There are now visual guidelines to separate elements, it's hard to read and it looks like it's missing something.