In addition to all the other yay-sayers I want to express my approval too. "Main" is useful for high-quality content but it is useless with its current distinction between "promoted" and not. "Discussion" is full of stuff I do not care about or only very little, as is the case with "Main". Tags + "Best of" solve both problems nicely. For the tags take a predefined dictionary and users with high karma count have the ability to re-tag.
That way I can subscribe to the topics I actually care about and do not have to read about meetups on the other end of the world or some nuance of effective giving of money I simply do not have.
Oh and nice catch of the holding off solutions stuff.
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