In the past year I haven't commented on LW very much. However, I have had the chance to go to several LW meetups, and to meet up individually with people when they visit Oxford. I think the latter has been very valuable - the chance to interact with interesting people on a more intense basis than meetups, and with better feedback than online. And at the moment, if I wanted to visit another city I'd do it by getting in touch with people I knew there. But people I knew from LW would satisfy this perfectly well, for a much wider range of locations.

So it seems it'd make sense for me to do something to subsidise people visiting for conferences or whatever - there are gains to trade to be had here, if we can but lower transaction costs sufficiently.