Keep in mind that it's not "more people" it's more "people who participate in meta threads on Less Wrong". I've observed a tremendous divergence between the latter set, and "what LWers seem to think during real-life conversations" (e.g. July Minicamp private discussions of LW which is where the anti-troll-thread ideas were discussed, asking what people thought about recent changes at Alicorn's most recent dinner party). I'm guessing there's some sort of effect where only people who disagree bother to keep looking at the thread, hence bother to comment.

Some "people" were claiming that we ought to fix things by moderation instead of making code changes, which does seem worth trying; so I've said to Alicorn to open fire with all weapons free, and am trying this myself while code work is indefinitely in progress. I confess I did anticipate that this would also be downvoted even though IIRC the request to do that was upvoted last time, because at this point I've formed the generalization "all moderator actions are downvoted", either because only some people participate in meta threads, and/or the much more horrifying hypothesis "everyone who doesn't like the status quo has already stopped regularly checking LessWrong".

I'm diligently continuing to accept feedback from RL contact and attending carefully to this non-filtered source of impressions and suggestions, but I'm afraid I've pretty much written-off trying to figure out what the community-as-a-whole wants by looking at "the set of people who vigorously participate in meta discussions on LW" because it's so much unlike the reactions I got when ideas for improving LW were being discussed at the July Minicamp, or the distribution of opinions at Alicorn's last dinner party, and I presume that any other unfiltered source of reactions would find this conversation similarly unrepresentative.