As the author of one of the rehash posts, I agree that these sorts of topics are generally pretty boring and uninteresting to read. There's nothing surprising or new in them, and they seem pretty obvious when you read them.
But the point (of mine at least) wasn't really to expose any new material, so much as to try to push people into doing something useful. As far as I can tell, a large portion of the readers of LW don't implement various easy life-improvement methods, and it was really more intended as a push to encourage people to use them.
On the one hand, a lot of interesting stuff on LW is "applied rationality" and its really fun to read, but I'm fairly skeptical as to how useful it is for most people. There's nothing wrong with it being interesting and fun, but there are other things to talk about.
More and more, LessWrong's posts are meta-rationality posts, about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, in general, without any specific application. This is probably the intended purpose of the site. But they're starting to bore me.
What drew me to LessWrong is that it's a place where I can put rationality into practice, discussing specific questions of philosophy, value, and possible futures, with the goal of finding a good path through the Singularity. Many of these topics have no other place where rational discussion of them is possible, online or off. Such applied topics have almost all moved to Discussion now, and may be declining in frequency.
This isn't entirely new. Applied discussions have always suffered bad karma on LW (statistically; please do not respond with anecdotal data). I thought this was because people downvote a post if they find anything in it that they disagree with. But perhaps a lot of people would rather talk about rationality than use it.
Does anyone else have this perception? Or am I just becoming a LW old geezer?
At the same time, LW is taking off in terms of meetups and number of posts. Is it finding its true self? Does the discussion of rationality techniques have a larger market than debates over Sleeping Beauty (I'm even beginning to miss those!) Is the old concern with values, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity something for LW to grow out of?
(ADDED: Some rationality posts are good. I am also a lukeprog fan.)