Or my impressions are distorted.
I'm going with distorted.
Take MWI for example; apparently a lot of people are under the impression that LWers must be ~100% MWI fanatics. But the annual surveys report that lukewarm endorsements of MWI as the least bad QM interpretation covers, what, <50% of respondents? And it's not clear to me that LW is even different from mainstream physicists, since the occasional polls of them show MWI keeps becoming more popular. It seems like people overgeneralize from the generally respectful treatment of MWI as a valid alternative (as opposed to early criticism of it as nonsense or crackpot pseudoscience) and from MWI topics being a lot more fun to discuss than, say, Copenhagen.
Or, global pandemics are regularly rated in the survey as a very concerning x-risk up there with AI, but are discussed much less; possibly because the risk of pandemics seems well-appreciated by society at large and there's little new to discuss.
Similarly for some of the other stereotypical beliefs; critics like Stross and XiXiDu have been campaigning to turn Roko's basilisk into the defining shibboleth of LW, but do even <5% of LWers take it seriously or as more than an obscure hypothetical in one superseded decision theory? (I don't think so but in that case I can't prove it with survey data.)
And with TDT and acausal trading, they're technical and difficult enough, relying heavily on formal logic and decision theory, that it's hard to make any comments on them at all, either pro or con. Personally, I don't believe in acausal trading. But I also don't ever come out and talk about it, because I don't feel I understand it or UDT/TDT well, am not particularly interested in them, and have nothing new to contribute to conversations about them; so why would I write about them, and if I were writing about them, why would you or anyone want to read what I wrote?
I think the greatest issue with Less Wrong is that it lacks direction. There doesn't appear to be anyone driving it forward or helping the community achieve its goals. At the start this role was taken by Eliezer, but he barely seems active these days. The expectation seems to be that things will happen spontaneously, on their own. And that has worked for a few things (is. SubReddit, study hall, ect.), but on the while the community is much less effective than it could be.
I want to give an example of how things could work. Let's imagine Less Wrong had some kind of executive (as opposed to moderators who just keep everything in order). At the start of the year, they could create a thread asking about what goals they thought were important for Less Wrong - ie. Increasing the content in main, producing more content for a general audience, increasing female participation rate.
They would then have a Skype meeting to discuss the feedback and to debate which ones that wanted to primarily focus on. Suppose for example they decided they wanted to increase the content in main. They might solicit community feedback on what kinds of articles they'd like to see more of. They might contact people who wrote discussion posts that were main quality and suggest they submit some content there instead. They could come up with ideas of new kinds of contentLW might find useful (ie. Project management) and seed the site with content on that area to do that people understand that kind of content is desired.
These roles would take significant work, but I imagine people would be motivated to do this by altruism or status. By discussing ideas in person (instead of just over the internet), they there would be more of an opportunity to build a consensus and they would be able to make more progress towards addressing these issues.
If a group said that they thought A was an important issue and the solution was X, most members would pay more attention than if a random individual said it. No-one would have to listen to anything they say, but I imagine that many would choose to. Furthermore if the exec were all actively involved in the projects, I imagine they'd be able to complete some smaller ones themselves, or at least provide the initial push to get it going.