There are various people who feel that Lesswrong degraded in the last year. In the same timeframe more and more discussions moved into the open thread model and open threads became weekly instead of monthly.
I suggest to counteract that trend by opening all discussions per default on Discussion instead of opening them in weekly open threads. Having the topics in discussion makes it easy to browse the list of topics and choose the headline that are of interest, even if the thread got opened two weeks ago.
The open threads aren't great lately, but they're almost the last remaining sign of life at LW. Instead of shutting down the open threads, I recommend doing discussion posts which point out the best parts of the open threads, and also doing some brain-storming about how to find good topics for posts.
Thanks for taking the initiative to make the new "Post Ideas thread, Nancy "Anti-Bystander Effect" Lebovitz