I maintain one of my accounts for use in getting technical help on software specific subs. I haven’t noticed a decline there, they continue to deliver as much advice as they always did and with no weirdness.

I did notice though, because on that account I hadn’t opted out of the redesign, that they’ve successfully made the new design way shittier than it even already was. It’s really hard to see your messages now, which are essential for the purpose that I maintain the account because I post a question, and then get back to work knowing it could be hours or days before there’s a response and I just come back to check later if anyone had any helpful advice. I now have to somehow find the messages in amongst chat features which only contain unsolicited messages from randoms about some irrelevance or another that they’re pushing. Or also some other weirdness about people I’m “following” which fortunately doesn’t appear to have been populated for me but is still pointless clutter that gets in the way of the actual utility of the forum.

Definitely not a fan of that shitty new design approach. It’s funny actually, while I may have grumbled at developments over the years there, nothing quite bad enough could make me leave and it was only the demolition of the 3rd party apps that provided the impetus, but it was never really only the apps, I could sense something was going in a bad direction but couldn’t point to any one particularly egregious thing that would merit boycotting something I actually really liked and poured a lot of time in to without sounding really petty and entitled.

Now there’s this design issue and the reports that the place is starting to degrade heavily as an actual forum and I feel reassured that I left there at really just the right time rather than trying to keep swimming in the rapidly evaporating pond.