I suppose you're right in saying that LW isn't supposed to be a forum, but the fact remains that there is a growing trend towards more casual/off-topic/non-rationalism discussion, which seems perfectly fine to me given that we are a community of generally like-minded people. I suspect that it would be preferable to many if LW had better accommodations for these sort of interactions, perhaps something separate from main site so we could cleanly distinguish serious rationalism discussion from off-topic discussion.