I should add: The main advantage for me of changing the subreddit partition of LW is to encourage a greater range and specificity of content; at the moment, I think some stuff I'd like to see is discouraged by the Main/Discussion partition. An example would be LWers picking a specific thing (a lifehack or specific self-improvement skill, say) and having a thread to post their progress, observations, and research. This seems like it's currently acceptable in small amounts, but I think the level of such posts that would be most conducive to communal self-improvement would be frowned upon under the current partition; many would consider it spammy/obnxious.
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