It has occurred to me to wonder whether the poll might be biased. I wanted to add a summary of things that protect LessWrong against endless September when I wrote this post. However, I couldn't think of even one. I figured my thread to debate whether we should have better protection would have turned up any compelling reasons to think LessWrong is protected but it didn't.

I became curious about this just now wondering whether there really isn't a single reason to think that LessWrong is protected, and I re-read all of the comments (though not the replies to the comments) to see if I had forgotten any. This comment by AndrewHickey was the closest thing I found to an argument that there is something protecting LessWrong:

If anything, LW is far more at risk of becoming an echo chamber than of an eternal September. Fora can also die just by becoming a closed group and not being open to new members, and given that there's a fairly steep learning curve before someone is accepted here ("read the Sequences!") it would, if anything, make more sense to be reducing barriers to entry rather than adding more.

1. The registration numbers showed that LessWrong is gaining members fast, so the echo chamber idea does not appear to be supported.

2. As for the "steep learning curve" idea, the 2012 Survey Results show that only 1/4 of the survey respondents have read the Sequences, and that 60% of those who have participated either have not read them or have not finished them. Considering that the majority of participants haven't finished the sequences, I think LessWrong's steep learning curve is more likely to add to the risk than to have any protective benefits because if most people are going "Your culture is TLDR, I'm commenting anyway." then they're going to be participating without all the cultural knowledge.

One reflex is to think that the current karma system will protect LessWrong against endless September but thinking about that strategy further, one realizes that there is a limit to how many new posts older users can read and vote on, so this would not help if there were enough new users or users closer to the mean to overwhelm their voting capacity.

As far as I can tell, there's currently nothing that is likely to protect LessWrong from eternal September.