I think you have correctly pin-pointed one reason for the decline of LW: That the ratio of actually practically useful stuff is low. But that is because the most useful stuff has been already said. It may be somewhat hard to find because it doesn't appear prominently each day new. And saying it twice in the same form isn't such a good idea (but see the sequence rerun; I got something from that).
What remains? things that are not yet said. And these are mostly in the area of a) LW core topics esp. AI safety, b) community stability (with this I mean some kind of echo chamber where people keep the spirit of the posts if not the amazing insightfulness) and c) news - and probably some lesser d) and e).
There is still a lot to find e.g. in the media thread.
PS. I think you should remove the Downfall thing from the title. It will just net you downvotes.
OK, so let's look at the "ratio" problem: it only exists if you assume that every new addition lands in the same "pool" as the rest, right?
So the way to solve this would by introducing some organisation. Anything rigid probably wouldn't work, but what could is maybe something I would call "organic organisation". For example:
make it easy for each user to leave a "trail" of concepts, ideas, articles, links etc. that were useful to him at different stages of progress in a given topic,
make it easy to follow trails of
Note 1: I'm not very serious about the second part of the title, I just thought it sounds more catchy. I'm a long time lurker writing here for the first time, and it's not my intention to alienate anyone. Also, hi, nice to meet you. Please leave a comment to achieve a result of making me happy about you having left a comment. But let's get to the point.
I think you might be familiar with TED Talks. Recall the last time you watched one, and how you felt while doing it.
[BZRT BZRT sound of imagination working]
In my case, I often got the feeling like if I was learning something valuable while watching most TED Talks. The speakers are (mostly) obviously passionate and intelligent people, speaking about important matters they care about a lot. (Granted, I probably haven't watched more than a dozen TED Talks in all my life, so my sample is quite small, but I think it isn't very unrepresentative.)
But at some point, I started asking myself afterwards:
Which translates in my internal dialect to:
(Note 2: don't treat this "one sentence summary" thing too strictly - of course it's only a reflex/shorthand that is useful in many situations, but not all. I like it because it's simple enough that it's installable as a subconscious trigger-action.)
And I could not state afterwards anything actually useful that I have learned from those "fascinating" videos (with at most one or two small exceptions).
This is exactly what I mean by "Education as Entertainment".
It's getting the enjoyable *feeling* of learning without any real progress.
[DUM DUM DUM sound of increasing dramatism]
And now, what if you use this concept to look at rationality materials?
For me, reading the core Eliezer's braindump (basically the content of "From AI to Zombies"), as well as braindumps (in the form of blogs) of several other people from the LW community, had definite learning value.
I take notes when I read those, and I have an accountability system in place that enables me to make sure I follow up on all the advice I give to myself, test the new ideas, and improve/drop/replace/implement as needed.
However, when I read (a significant part of) the content produced by the "modern" community-powered-LessWrong, I classify its actual learning value at around the same level as TED Talks.
Or YouTube videos with cats, only those don't give me the *impression* that I'm learning something.
THE END
Please let me know what you think.
Final Note: Please take my remarks with a grain of salt. What I write is meant to inspire thoughts in you, not to represent my best factual knowledge about the LW community.