The clearest way to improve discussions here, which has been called for numerous times, is reorganizing the subreddits and adding a few new ones. So far we haven't even got a separate subreddit for meetups, which should be uncontroversial, although I hear it is under development. Despite the simplicity of this proposed change, apparently the codebase makes it difficult. How much would it cost to expedite the development, if that's a possibility, and could we let people donate money directly toward this feature? If it's too expensive, how about cheap alternative approaches, such as adding a menu with links to a handful of "top-level" tags, at least one of which every new post should be tagged with? .
So far we haven't even got a separate subreddit for meetups
which should be uncontroversial
um, no.
apparently the codebase makes it difficult
That's old, from before discussion existed, whose existence shows that the problem has been solved.
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.