Comment When opposing sides agree to something... (Score 1) 2219
Having gone through all comments ranked 3 and above, and a random sampling of those at score 2, there wasn't one that definitely supported the beta. At best there were a bare handful of lukewarm "wait and see" and "it's not that big a deal," which is not support, merely acceptance.
So close to 99% of comments actively dislike or outright hate it.
There's a cynical adage in politics, which is roughly this: if all parties who normally disagree on everything, suddenly and overwhelmingly unite very passionately on a particular topic, then it's a very, very bad thing. No the analogy doesn't quite hold, but I hope the point is clear.
I tried the beta. It sucks, for all the reasons others have mentioned, but particularly the broken comment thread/thresholds and enormous waste of space. You already drove my visits down 50% when you released the horrible mobile interface (with "filtered due to preferences" often taking up more space than comments themselves, wtf?), take away the current/classic and I'm done with this site. The "disable advertising" option has been unchecked for a long while now, but as of today that box is ticked in protest.