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Jacobian comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I'll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It's not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don't know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don't think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.
I'm also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I've participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you're interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I'm not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.
Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.
Agreed, the comments (fortified by the voting system) are a huge reason why I'm here. I bought Rationality A-Z for ease of reading, but discovered that I didn't like it at all without seeing the discussion spawned by every post. In particular, it is very easy to be convinced by a well-written but subtly flawed argument, unless an equally well written rebuttal is in the comments.
The voting system is something that I would hate to lose too, I am very impressed by the people here really upvoting based more on quality than on vacuous agreement. I've had my first three comments on the site and one of my first posts massively downvoted, and it hurt, but now I'm very happy for it.
Wait a minute, comments are upvoted based on quality rather than agreement? Until now, I thought that if a comment had, say, nine points, it meant that there existed at least nine LessWrongers who agreed with everything the comment author said. That is not so?
It's both. There are no "official" guidelines on how you should up/downvote, but a commonly expressed heuristic is "upvote what you want to see more of, and downvote what you would like to see less of". In practice, people vote to signify all kinds of things: agree/disagree, true/false, cool/uncool, interesting/boring, oooh/eeew, etc.