I'm also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him.

Yeah, it's a problem. I'd even go so far as to say that it's a cognitive hazard, not just a PR or recruitment difficulty: if you've got only one person at the clear top of a status hierarchy covering some domain, then halo effects can potentially lead to much worse consequences for that domain than if you have a number of people of relatively equal status who occasionally disagree. Of course there's also less potential for infighting, but that doesn't seem to outweigh the potential risks.

There was a long gap in substantive posts from EY before the epistemology sequence, and I'd hoped that a competitor might emerge from that vacuum. Instead the community seems to have branched; various people's personal blogs have grown in relative significance, but LW has stayed Eliezer's turf in practice. I haven't fully worked out the implications, but they don't seem entirely good, especially since most of the community's modes of social organization are outgrowths of LW.

I think a part of the problem with other people filling the "vacuum" left by Eliezer is that when he was writing the sequences it was a large amount of informal material. Since then we've established a lot of very formal norms for main-level posts; the "blog" is now about discussions with a lot of shared background rather than about trying to use a bunch of words to get some ideas out.

That is, most of the point of the sequences is laying out ground rules. There's no vacuum left over for anyone to fill, and LW isn't really a "blog" any more, so much as a community or discussion board.

And for me, personally, at least, a lot of the attraction of LW and the sequences is not that Eliezer did a bunch of original creative work, but that he verbalized and worked out a bit more detail on a variety of ideas that were already familiar, and then created a community where people have to accept that and are therefore trustworthy. What this "feels like on the inside" is that the community is here because they share MY ideas about epistemology or whatever, rather than because they share HIS ideas, even if he was the one to write them down.

Of course YMMV and none of this is a controlled experiment; I could be making up bad post hoc explanations.

Apply skepticism evenly? I mean, you don't have to do/participate in something just because a bunch of other people are doing it. TBH, I'd like to see a type of "sequence review" of stuff from other major writers on this site. It's useful in that I'll occasionally read one if I don't remember having read it before, so I can't knock it.

I've read Yudkowsky's Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don't have)

This seems to be a common problem. It certainly happened to me.