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This is how Stack Overflow looks when you visit it the very first time

enter image description here

There are four dismissable dialogs/announcements there and two things in the sidebar begging for attention. You have to dismiss three of these to even start using the site as they overlap important content. The consent dialog is not avoidable, the others are. This is already described in this post on MSE, but I'm repeating it here as it is part of the problem I'll describe.

The two highlighted sidebar items remain highlighted no matter what I do. No idea if that is a bug or not, but they remain visually distracting.

But then after you clicked all these things away and maybe looked at Chat or Challenges as they demanded your attention, you'll try to get back to the list of questions. Okay, I know that this is behind the "Questions" link in the sidebar, but my instinct is always to click on "Home" like on any other website. And I assume most people will do that as well.

At that point you're greeted with this:

enter image description here

Okay, I don't read it as I'm not interested and dismiss this with the expectation that I'll get to the homepage. I don't, if you dismiss this dialog you don't go anwhere.

I click on it again and select a tag randomly. I still don't read the fineprint, because who does. It asks for light mode or dark mode. Don't care, I click next. Then, for a full three seconds I see the following:

enter image description here

This dialog intentionally wastes my time for three seconds. I'm pretty sure there is nothing computationally intensive going on in the background there. It's not actually setting up anything, it's just pretending and wasting my time.

And finally I arrive at this

enter image description here

I must create an account to view the homepage, there is no other way. I could have known that if I had read the fine print on the tag selection part of this dialog, but well that's not an excuse to require this.

This is a horrible user experience, the sidebar link that users are most likely to click lands you in a terrible signup flow pretending to be customization. So even if you dismiss it the first time, odds are you'll reflexively click on "Home" at some point again, triggering this dialog. And you can't just click anywhere to dismiss it, you have to hit the X inside the modal.

I understand SE is trying to get more vistors to sign up, but pissing off anonymous users is not the right way to do that.

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    "The two highlighted sidebar items remain highlighted no matter what I do. No idea if that is a bug or not, but they remain visually distracting." TL;DR: yes, it's a bug. Commented Jun 5 at 14:56
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    "I must create an account to view the homepage, there is no other way. I could have known that if I had read the fine print on the tag selection part of this dialog, but well that's not an excuse to require this." status-bait-and-switch-by-design (see experiment 4) Commented Jun 5 at 15:02
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    the "sign in with google" modal should just be removed from the entire codebase of the entire internet. Let users sign in with google if they want, on the sign-in page, but never prompt them about it with a modal. God how annoying. Google should be hit with an antitrust lawsuit for that behavior/code. Commented Jun 5 at 15:37
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    The problems described in this post can be summed up easily. Commented Jun 5 at 15:39
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    For me, the consent box is far smaller, and the google sign in doesn't pop up. it seems fairly reasonable, as far as what I was presented. Though i would argue indicating that there's a new thing in the side bar to someone who isn't signed in and hasn't been here before (aka has no cookies) that something is new is kinda hitting the wrong audience and is unnecessary. So is all the "new" indicators on those links. We shouldn't be highlighting things that can't be dismissed because the user isn't signed in. Commented Jun 5 at 16:12
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    Yeah, that's what the site looks like to an EU visitor. Visitors in the US get a slightly less stupid cookie banner. Commented Jun 5 at 16:30
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    Related Three clicks before we get to SE content (yesterday), What does a new user need in a homepage experience on Stack Overflow? (nine months ago) Commented Jun 5 at 16:31
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    Why does it show up a popup with what's new for people who are new to the site? Commented Jun 5 at 17:57
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    @Dharman so that if you visit a question (say, from a search engine) you will be up to date with the latest developments on the site. Trivial things like, say, the text of the question and/or answers is surely not as important, hence the popup covers it up. Commented Jun 5 at 18:00
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    If there aren't any new users, it wouldn't matter how bad their experience is. Commented Jun 5 at 23:50
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    No matter from where you access the sites cookie banner is just too huge and badly positioned. Also necessary cookies only button is a lie as it includes unnecessary permissions for vendors. Google login popup absolutely needs to go away, as well as home page configuration which is not stored unless you make an account. Commented Jun 6 at 11:00
  • It's such a disconnect between different sites too. Some times throw up a half a screen wall of text with a hundred sliders on it, and other sites just say "we use cookies, m'kay?" Commented Jun 6 at 13:04
  • On my normal sized screen the cookies message is too big for the screen and does not render correctly, it needs scroll bars. (1920x1080) Commented Jun 10 at 7:18

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I agree that this isn’t the ideal experience. I’ve passed this along to the product team and asked that they take a look and see if there are quick and easy changes that we can make here. The problem is that these are several unrelated systems that don’t talk to each other, so there’s some workflow challenges here. I’m going to ask the product team to respond here.

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