Hm. Let me throw out several points in random order:
-- I don't think LW is a "general-interest" forum. Not even "relatively". However that's fine -- there are really no such things as general-interest forums because their lack of focus kills them. What you have, actually, is online communities some of which spend their time chatting about whatever in the general section of their forums. But that general section is just for overflow, the community itself is formed and kept together by something that binds much tighter than general interest.
-- If I rephrase your post along the lines of "LW is a web-based club for smart people. How do we get more smart people to join our club?" -- would you object?
-- Size matters. In particular, online communities have certain optimal size for cohesiveness -- be too small and it's just a few old-timers making inside jokes; grow too big and you drown in a cacophony of noise. I've seen online communities mutate into something quite different from the original through massive growth. That may be fine in the grand scheme of things, but the original character is lost.
-- While attracting "elite" how are you going to get rid of hoi polloi? If people arrive, set up camp in LW, and start discussing Jennifer Anniston's butt and what a horrible hangover did they have today after being gloriously trashed yesterday, what are you going to do about it?
-- There is correlation between "being highly successful in real life" and "being able to avoid wasting time chattering away on the 'net".
-- I think I would support some additional granularity to this site (subreddit style), especially if we get some population growth. Nothing like Reddit itself, of course, but the existence of two parts and two parts only seems to be an artifact from the olden days (when you went to school up the hill both ways).
-- And finally, the important question: what do you want to achieve? Is it just having more smart people around to talk to, or there's more? In particular, with Pinky and the Brain flavour?
Pinky and the Brain flavour?
I laughed at that.
It strikes me as somewhat double-edged though, insomuch as Pinky and the Brain never actually succeed at their nightly plan (as far as I know). And since TRY often never gets further than "talk about", we might ask how the conversation actually contributes to the ultimate goal. So far I would say LW has had a net positive effect therein; I expect we'll continue to pay attention to that effect and shape it consciously.
Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.