LW seems to be slowly becoming self-obsessed.

I don't see how you could possibly be observing that trend. The earliest active comment threads on Less Wrong were voting / karma debates. Going meta is not only what we love best, it's what we're best at, and that's always been so.

Yes, but the real question is why we love going meta. What is it about going meta that makes it worthwhile to us? Some have postulated that people here are actually addicted to going meta because it is easier to go meta than to actually do stuff, and yet despite the lack of real effort, you can tell yourself that going meta adds significant value because it helps change some insight or process once but seems to deliver recurring payoffs every time the insight or process is used again in the future...

...but I have a sneaking suspicion that this theory was just a pat answer that was offered as a status move, because going meta on going meta puts one in a position of objective examination of mere object level meta-ness. To understand something well helps one control the thing understood, and the understanding may have required power over the thing to learn the lessons in the first place. Clearly, therefore, going meta on a process would pattern match to being superior to the process or the people who perform it, which might push one's buttons if, for example, one were a narcissist.

I dare not speculate on the true meaning and function of going meta on going meta on going meta, but if I were forced to guess, I think it might have something to do with a sort of ironic humor over the appearance of mechanical repetitiveness as one iterates a generic "going meta" operation that some might naively have supposed to be the essence of human mental flexibility. Mental flexibility from a mechanical gimmick? Never!

Truly, we should all collectively pity the person who goes meta on going meta on going meta on going meta, because their ironically humorous detachment is such a shallow trick, and yet it is likely to leave them alienated from the world, and potentially bitter at its callous lack of self-aware appreciation for that person's jokes.