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btrettel comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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A reason to shut down the forum entirely instead of leaving it in its current state is that low quality posts made by randos here can hurt the reputation of the forum and the people & organizations that were at one time or another affiliated with it. See e.g. this farewell that someone linked to on SlateStarCodex. There places online like the /r/SneerClub subreddit where people will post something that one particular Less Wrong user said and make fun of it, which tarnishes the reputation of the site in general. Banning Lumifer and VoiceOfRa would help a little in the short term, but running a quality online forum requires ongoing maintenance.
"Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" is good advice.
There's no reason to shut down the entire forum if the problems can be solved with less collateral damage.
Having participated in online communities which would somewhat regularly get made fun of by others, I'm not sure I agree that others making fun of an online community tarnishes its reputation in the general population. Seems to me that most people aren't aware of the people making fun of the community. I think dishonest representations with wider distribution are much more harmful, e.g., RationalWiki's take on LessWrong. And we should do something about that, but again, I don't think shutting down the forum is the right approach.
Also, I tend to ignore farewell posts like that. In my experience, they happen regardless of the "health" of the community. I can think of one online community I've participated in that regularly has such threads, despite activity being at an all time high. They can describe real problems which should be fixed, but often don't.
One thing that can happen is that there will be an anti-community that springs up around making fun of the original community, and then a journalist will write a story about the community that the anti-community will discover and leave negative comments on (or the journalist will discover the anti-community and write a story on its existence--remember that journalists are strongly incentivized to drive pageviews).
LW is not popular for a story about the reddit community making fun of LW to be a story that's interesting to the general public. The existance of someone critizing LW isn't a good story.
Seriously, if you're going to go into panic mode every time someone outside the community criticizes it, you'll never accomplish anything.
Can you provide an example of the scenario you describe, or something like it? I agree that journalists can cause harm with irresponsible stories, but I'm less sure of the entire "anti-community" aspect. It could depend on what you mean by "anti-community", though.