The volume of quality content getting posted to LW is not as high as it could be. So one idea is code modifications that nudge users to publish more high-quality content.

When you write:

This article is something that has been in my head for a while. I hadn't planned on doing a write-up so soon. I wanted to take the time to a) refine my ideas and b) figure out how to express them clearly before posting. But the recent post Less Wrong lacks direction made me change my mind. My thinking now is that I overestimated the downside (wasting peoples time with a less than fully thought out post) and that there's enough value to justify posting a rough draft now.

I have a feeling that there are many articles like this that people have half-baked that they haven't gotten around to refining. I have lots of half-baked articles, for example. In my case, I endorse not working on those articles because I feel like I've got higher-priority stuff to do. Commenting on your article is more relaxing and something I can do in my spare time. But maybe that's the problem. Maybe the problem is that because posting to LW is framed as "work" for almost everyone, we get very few posts. (How many successful online forums do you think make posting feel like work? E.g. think of the GameFAQs forum, the XKCD forum, etc. Maybe the reason Q&A sites like Quora do so well is that writing a high quality response to a question doesn't feel like work. So, more LW Q&A threads?)

Or maybe it's fine that people see writing quality LW posts as work. Maybe the real issue is that they don't think it's valuable work. They notice that most comments even on highly-upvoted LW posts are critical, and subconsciously infer (with their primate brains) that making posts is not a socially sanctioned activity. Maybe what we need is a "blogging carnival" (like the EA community was doing for a while) where someone chooses a prompt at the beginning of the month and challenges people to write a post on that topic before the month is over.