Currently, the prevailing opinion on the Internet is that Steem is dead, we can say that at one time there was a real propaganda campaign on this topic. A radical design change will largely disprove this thesis.

I hadn't thought of this but it's really well said. There's definitely a perception that Steemit's dormant and what better way of saying "it's not" than to freshen it up!

I call on the Steemit team to take a step against the efforts of @the-gorilla!

It is also worth thinking about the greater visual appeal of design elements, but do not forget about the performance of the site. For example, if you try to access ecency from an old laptop, it will wait a few seconds, while steemit.com loads instantly.

None of what I've changed will affect performance (although 24 posts being returned instead of 20 would work better for the flexibility of 2, 3 or 4 column layouts).