We should somehow survey the users to see if their alone-in-a-crowd attitude prevents them from actively posting, and then encourage them to post, because compartmentalization is not a good habit. And I think people who agree that you should help the epileptic however many people are also present, but not that you should speak out 'what is obvious' if there are other users with a history of commenting, compartmentalize.

(OTOH, maybe it's me rationalizing asking much and answering little.)

In regards to the article, the idea of subsections or seperations of topics has already been raised in this post. I personally think it would make more sense to be able to create personal sections based on query results. So, it would just be a saved search query. It would be a section that you can name that would be shown only to you and would run a search when you enter it. The search would just be a normal search that you can run now.

Some ideas I have had on improving the site are:

• An announcements sub-section. One reason for why less people might be coming to the site is that the Main is clogged up with Meetup announcements.
• Optional comment when liking or disliking. The like/dislike status is useful with helping to sort posts in terms of quality, but it doesn't really help improve existing posts. If your post, gets disliked, then most of the time you don't know why it was disliked. If your post was disliked with a comment, then you could spend effort to fix the post, reply to the comment and then the disliker would hopefully reneg the dislike. This would lead to you wanting to improve posts once they have been created. The comment would only be sent to article creator.
• Section with post karma that does not affect your personal karma. This would help with new members who start posting lower quality posts and then give up because their user has poor karma. I think your ability to post in discussion or main should be based on the post and comment karma. This means that posts in the section without personal karma would, if liked enough, allow you to post in main.

In regards to the above comment, this is what I think of your points:

• The barriers to entry (reading the sequences, reading the 'seminal' comment threads, etc.) are too high for most people - I agree. This is why I have started writing a rationality primer. I will post an article with more details on this maybe next week.
• There is only so much 'low-hanging fruit' lying around. In terms of general rationality - while this is true, I think that there is still alot of area that could be covered in terms of applied general rationality. By this I mean practical advice. This also doesn't require expert domain knowledge. You just need to go out and actually try something. I think that less wrong can improve in this area.
• I like AI because at least it offers the possibility for new material to arise every once in a while - I think that there is alot of content that is tangentially related to rationality that could be extremely helpful. Once again, I think a more practical focus would get people thinking in more divergent directions. Personally, I plan to write some sequences around the idea of strategy it would touch on Mental models, Complexity theory, Systems dynamics, Boydian thinking and maybe some other stuff .