Originally this was a separate comment; it's basically a rehash of childofbaud's comment though, so I moved to a reply:
Much stronger meet-up integration. Mailing lists shouldn't be offsite, they should be part of the site. Something like discussion section, but you put your location in as part of signing up, and gain access to a 'Location' section that operates the way that Discussion operates. Details are unimportant; the main part is that meet-ups need a more integrated system, the tools that meetup threads use (mailing lists, schedule-matching) need to be available on LessWrong, and being part of your geographically local group of LessWrongers needs to be opt-out, not opt-in.
I don't disagree about the benefits of integration and improvements to meet-up threads, but opt out is a fairly obnoxious way to manage anything. I don't see anything in those other benefits that requires (or even is improved by) opt out. I may be missing something though and am interested to hear why opt out improves them.
Any new arrangement should not be confined to one's profile location - consider travellers wanting to see if there's a meet-up coinciding with their travel.
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!