FWIW Matt, I'll take the karma hit and say that I think the new design is nice. There are minor things that could be tweaked, but I can't help but think that all this strong negativity is mostly just status quo bias.
Every time Facebook rolls out a new layout, my news feed fills up with people screaming that they're really going to leave this time, and I get invitations to 5 different "Bring Back the Old Way!" groups. Eventually you start to notice a pattern, and to distrust your Automatic Strong Negative Reaction to Any Change. You let that phase pass, actually put in the minor effort to learn the new interface, and a week later you don't even notice the difference.
There are little things in the interface that I'm sure will fall into place in the coming weeks (for example, I agree with the notions that there's a little too much separation on the nested comments, and that the envelope icon is counter-intuitive) , but overall I think that if you "redesigned" the site in reverse, you'd have just as much (probably more) complaining.
It looks good, some of the new features are really nice, and I see the rationale behind some of the more controversial ones. Thanks.
I'll take the karma hit
heh
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 it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus.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?