Replacing Main with Best of LW might work, though it would require more programming work.
The trouble with tags is that it's hard to make sure people use them properly and consistently.
The trouble with tags is that it's hard to make sure people use them properly and consistently.
That's why you don't let users invent tags of their own but enforce a unified premade dictionary.
Also I know at least one website which lets people with sufficiently high karma retag posts of others -- that should be helpful with fixing problems.
Less Wrong is based on reddit code, which means we can create subreddits with relative ease.
Right now we have two subreddits, Main and Discussion. These are distinguished not by subject matter, but by whether a post is the type of thing that might be promoted to the front page or not (e.g. a meetup announcement, or a particularly well-composed and useful post).
As a result, almost everything is published to Discussion, and thus it is difficult for busy people to follow only the subjects they care about. More people will be able to engage if we split things into topic-specific subreddits, and make it easy to follow only what they care about.
To make it easier for people to follow only what they care about, we're building the code for a Dashboard thingie.
But we also need to figure out which subreddits to create, and we'd like community feedback about that.
We'll probably start small, with just 1-5 new subreddits.
Below are some initial ideas, to get the conversation started.
Idea 1
Idea 2