These might be good substitutes in theory, but it's possible that they are not prominent enough on the site to be good practical substitutes, insomuch as people just don't know about them. That would probably be quickly and easily fixed by editing front page / sidebar HTML, but as it stands.
More generally, I (and I gather others) find LW somewhat kludgey, un- or outright counterintuitive, and time-consuming to familiarise oneself with. As such, responses like 'There's a workaround for that, you know' are not entirely satisfying.
Less Wrong is based on reddit code, which means we can create subreddits with relative ease.
Right now we have two subreddits, Main and Discussion. These are distinguished not by subject matter, but by whether a post is the type of thing that might be promoted to the front page or not (e.g. a meetup announcement, or a particularly well-composed and useful post).
As a result, almost everything is published to Discussion, and thus it is difficult for busy people to follow only the subjects they care about. More people will be able to engage if we split things into topic-specific subreddits, and make it easy to follow only what they care about.
To make it easier for people to follow only what they care about, we're building the code for a Dashboard thingie.
But we also need to figure out which subreddits to create, and we'd like community feedback about that.
We'll probably start small, with just 1-5 new subreddits.
Below are some initial ideas, to get the conversation started.
Idea 1
Idea 2