Aesthetically, I think it’s pretty nice. It uses the page space much better and it improves the images. However, functionally it’s a complete abortion. It essentially makes all the stories that aren’t the “headline of the moment” a challenge to browse. The blog format is popular because it’s very functional and allows you to scan stories in a hurry. The Twitterizing of the the headlines and removal of virtually all the thumbnails is a complete dealbreaker.
I’ve been spending all my time on Autoblog and Engadget and avoiding Gizmodo and Jalopnik like the plague.
I also really really hate it.
Some sites only release limited paragraphs or even just titles, which is annoying. However, I do use RSS for a lot of sites. In the case of io9, though, there are too few articles I end up reading to make it worth it.
Keeping to one main page wastes valuable microseconds, waiting for stories to load completely. I could be using that time to continue to scan down the list of stories, opening them up and letting them load in the background. I’ve also experienced that with the new design, about half the time the story won’t completely load correctly. It stays grayed out, with the “loading” wheel continuing to turn. I have to squint and read the very faint text, or just keep waiting forever.
I went right to the mis-named classic view, and don’t mind it (I’m not a fan of the default redesign). Or rather, I wouldn’t mind it if the site actually worked. I love reading the comments, and they are just horribly, horribly broken right now. First, a design decision: I don’t like that the comments default to “featured” only, but at least that was a conscious decision on their part. So the first thing I do is hit show “All”. This leads to a 30 second to a minute wait for the comments to load. Why? Why is this so broken that it takes a full minute, sometimes more, to load the comments?
Then, all responses are hidden. If there an interesting comment with replies, I hit the “show replies” button. Again, annoying that I have to do that, but whatever. This leads to another interminable wait for the comments to actually load.
I have no idea what’s going on in the back end (based on the amount of time it takes, I imagine it’s Chinese child labor manually retyping in all the comments I’ve requested to read, and they have to frequently refer to the dictionary for spelling), but the site is just about unusable now.