Thank you.
This looks like a case where the typical mind fallacy paid off. Part of why I made the brainstorming post is that I assumed people were like me-- blanking out when trying to come up with ideas. This gave me a theory which meant that a small amount of action might help, unlike the idea that LW had lost its best posters (but then why aren't we getting new major posters?) or that social groups (especially if they're dependent on new ideas) have a natural life cycle ending in death. Also, I consistently have karma over 90%, so I knew that fear of getting downvoted couldn't be the whole problem.
The fundamental flaw that I see with LessWrong's main site is that its karma/moderating system has the effect of silencing and banning people for being disagreed with or misunderstood. This is a major problem. You cannot mix "I don't agree with you" or "I don't understand you" with "you will be punished and silenced."
People who spam, flame, or otherwise destroy conversation are the ones who need to be silenced, ignored or banned, and a lot of sites like Facebook have separate buttons to perform exactly that function. People in...
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.