The borders on comments are fairly ugly, and far too thick.
I refreshed this page, and only the new comments had the thick, lime green border, so it seems to be a way to show which comments got posted since one last viewed the page. Anyway, it looks a bit off to me too; maybe it'd work almost as well if it had the same thickness as the normal, thinner border? The lime green colour would stick out less if the border weren't as thick.
Perhaps they [the thumb icons] can be shrunk a bit and placed in the title line of the comment, along with the permalink and reply icon?
I think this is worth a shot. (Also open to Alicorn's suggestion that the icons go back to being words, in which case they should probably stay at the bottom of comments.)
You could potentially hide all the icons unless you're mousing over the comment, to avoid clutter.
Count me as a vote against that idea.
I would actually prefer it if the border were thicker, or the color darker. That way, new comments would be harder to miss when scrolling through a discussion like this one, with close to 200 comments.
Perhaps make it an adjustable option in preferences.
I saw some discussion posts earlier talking about a LessWrong redesign, and now that things look different, I guess that it's been implemented. I'm always slightly annoyed for a while when a site I use gets redesigned because I have to relearn where everything is, but it eventually wears off once I'm used to the changes.
My initial impressions:
"Hmmm... it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus. It's not like I used many of them anyway."
"Okay, I've clicked my name to see my recently posted comments. Now, where's the link to see it in context? Oh, I guess I have to click that icon in the lower right corner. For some reason I was looking for something at the upper right of the comment box."
"Well, that worked. Now how do I click to the parent comment? Oh, wait, it's probably one of those new icons in the lower right corner. I'll just mouseover them to see what they do..."
::realization sets in::
"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"
So, what does everyone else think of the new redesign?