The advice, the tone, the vibe 'feels' wrong, somehow. If you forced me to use more precise language, I might say that, for several years now, I have kept a variety of procedural heuristics running in the background that help me ferret out bullshit, partisanship, wishful thinking, and other unsound debating tactics -- and important content on this website manages to trigger most of them.

To come up with a theory on the fly, maybe there are two modes of expansion for a group: by providing some service, and by sheer memetic virulence. One memetic virulence strategy operates by making outlandish promises that subscribing to it will make you smarter, richer, more successful, more attractive to the opposite sex, and just plain superior to other people - and then doing it in a way that can't obviously be proven wrong. This strategy usually involves people with loads of positive affect going around telling people how great their group is and how they need to join.

As a memetic defense strategy, people learn to identify this kind of spread and to shun groups that display its features. From the inside, this strategy manifests as a creepy feeling.

LW members have lots of positive affect around LW and express it all the time, the group seems to be growing without providing any services (eg no one's worried when a drama club grows, because they go and put on dramas, but it's not clear what our group is doing besides talking about how great we are), and we make outrageously bold claims about getting smarter and richer and sexier of the sort which virulent memes trying to propagate would have to make.

I don't think this creepiness detector operates on the conscious level, any more than the chance-of-catching-a-disease detector that tells us people with open sores all over their body are disgusting operates on a conscious level. We don't stop considering the open sores disgusting if we learn they're not really contagious, and we don't stop considering overblown self-improvement claims from an actively recruiting community to be a particularly virulent memetic vector even if we don't consciously believe that's what's going on.

(I'm still agnostic on that point. I'm sure no one intended this to be a meme optimized for self-propagation through outlandish promises, but it's hard to tell if it's started mutating that way.)