Are newcomers actually intimidated? Was anybody intimidated when they first arrived? (I wasn't.) Maybe this is a subject for a poll itself.

I am a newcomer and my initial complaint is that this is a hard site to navigate. It's good, at least, that the sequences are all in one place; but the posts are not categorized by topic and divided into subforums. It's a little slow to manoeuver.

The other thing that I found myself wanting was profile pages for the users (where they could if they chose put location, bio, date of first signup, etc.) Intro threads are great, but sometimes I want to know who you are right away.

We probably could also use non-post threads. For people studying a particular topic, or planning a meetup, or whatever. Or a plain off-topic thread.

I'm not sure how feasible any of this is -- it just seems that this is in between a blog and a forum, structurally, which prevents you from doing some of the things you might want to do on a forum. This isn't quite a "Rationalists' Cantina." Maybe it shouldn't be, though I'm inclined to think such a thing might be nice to have.