I think the value of attracting users to LW has a power law distribution. Both Luke Muehlhauser and Nate Soares were "discovered" through their writing for LW, and both went on to be MIRI's executive director. I think the core target audience for LW should be extremely intelligent people who, for one reason or another, haven't managed to find an IRL cluster of other extremely intelligent people to be friends with. (Obviously I welcome math grad students at Caltech who want to contribute, but I think they'll be substantially less motivated to find a community than someone of equivalent intellectual caliber who decided school was bullshit and dropped out at 17.)

Given that, I think LW's marketing should be optimized for very smart people with finely tuned bullshit detectors who may be relatively uneducated but are probably budding autodidacts. (That's part of the reason I added prominent links to the best textbooks thread/Anki when I wrote the about page.)