There are definitely some markets and demographics where assuming familiarity with other products and services such as Facebook and Twitter will work against us.
I’m all for de-cluttering the UI, in another topic we discussed the possibility of removing the word ‘new’ and just leaving the blue dot. For TL1+ users who have been on Discourse for a while that makes perfect sense.
But for new communities still trying to find their feet taking away a lot of these annotations could be pretty harmful. I asked in the other topic as to whether bootstrap mode would be affected and didn’t get a response, here the removal appears to be for all users.
Is there no scope to either tie these UI changes into trust levels (respecting bootstrap) or maintaining the annotations entirely, toggled as a user preference?