But I don't like being told what to do or telling others what to do, especially if it's proselytizing. So I would have no place in a such a community.

What community organizational structure are you comfortable with? What tradeoffs will you accept between organizational structure and goal satisfaction?

Also it seems to me that when a product needs to be resold by its consumers, like religion or Amway, that means the product probably isn't any good.

Does rationalists telling other people about rationality make rationality worse?

If Eliezer's ideas about solving confusing problems actually helped, some of the many researchers who read LW would've found them useful and told us about it. And if the sequences were as useful in everyday life as they are well-written, a lot of people would have demonstrated that convincingly by now.

It seems to me, though, that the Mormon style of proselytizing is learning about prospective buyers, figuring out how to make their lives better, and then helping implement that. The benefit of that system is you have a knowledgeable person finding the highest-value tip for potential customers, which gets a lot more customers than having your catalog available at the public library and letting them find what suits them best. The question is not whether or not the tip is effective, but who pays to find that out.