Yep, I just want to acknowledge this.
We’re certainly aiming to address the unmet needs of more active users on busy forums with some of these changes (especially the notification menu redesign). We’ll certainly be looking at refinements that for the needs of casual users as we refine this.
I think the sidebar is off to a pretty good start in addressing the needs of both casual users and power users. On sites with a lot of disparate activity, it can help a casual user with greater interest in some parts of the forum to more easily focus their attention there first. It also anticipates the needs of new communities that will start off with both chat and forum features.
Where it may fall short right now is in considering the needs of communities with a smaller focus that haven’t needed many tags or categories as a whole at all. That’s something we’ll need to iterate on the design to better address, but perhaps for these forums the “hamburger” mode is a decent place to start.
This all makes for interesting design work when we try to consider the diversity of communities out there and the diversity of needs for community members within them. I appreciate being able to share our early work so we get this kind of feedback from you all 