As to my hypothesis that growing the membership too quickly risks LW becoming just another online community, that can be tested without altering the public face of LW: in particular, it can be tested by collecting statistics on the rate of the appearance of new commentators, posters and voters and by comparing that to the rate at which established voters stop voting.

The most damning argument I know of against jimrandomh's proposal is that it does not talk about why he thinks LW came to have the high s/r ratio it does have and how and under what conditions that quality is likely to be lost.

Up voted for this. We need to take a good hard look at our current user base and figure out why Lesswrong seems to be (mostly) working.