Maybe a drop-down box with a few broad categories for "Why did you vote this way?" on every upvote or downvote so the commentor receives better feedback? It seems to me the system, while it has its value, is still often times just "yay!" or "boo!" buttons. Maybe you could devise something better?
My impression is that Slashdot had a system like this, but it didn't work very well and wasn't copied by many other places.
One thing that seems likely to happen is karma weighting. StackOverflow does a similar thing, where new users can't vote, and users with sufficient karma can. One can take this further and give higher karma weights to more established users; if, say, Eliezer upvotes something, that should probably result in more than one upvote.
But this assumes that every Eliezer upvote is the same, which probably isn't correct. An alternate idea is to talk about what part of the voter is approving or disapproving of a comment. If someone says "I, as a technical expert, think this comment is good," that conveys useful information in a way that "this comment is good because it is technical" doesn't, and it's easier to control who has access to what buttons than whether people are using those buttons correctly.
LW could have some value as a meta-level "hub" site for the rationality blog universe.
I think this is a huge part of the LW value proposition.
Get rid of the Main/Discussion dichotomy altogether. It's super broken.
I agree that it's broken but there are two important constraints to keep in mind when modifying it:
Don't break links to old LW articles.
Make the desired level of scrutiny for a post obvious.
Doing the former is a question of how the codebase is set up (but it looks like both main and discussion articles have the /lw/___/article_name/ structure, so this should be mostly okay).
The latter looks to me like it's better accomplished by something like tags and background colors / textbox borders than separate subreddits.
Or maybe just organically let posts that get north of X upvotes be marked with a "This is good stuff" status star and place them in a more prominent spot.
My current thought is that a good solution to this problem also attacks the specialization problem and uses tags to a big degree; it would be neat if someone could use LW as something like an RSS feed, where the tags for a post or link modified its karma ("show me all posts with at least 10 karma, give high-scrutiny posts an extra 5 karma, give animal-rights posts an extra 3 karma, and give math posts negative 10 karma" results in them still seeing exceptional math posts and mediocre (or very new) high-scrutiny animal-rights posts).
Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.
Technical Changes
Changes will be tracked as issues on the LW issue tracker here. Volunteer contributions very welcome and will be rewarded with karma, and if you'd like to be paid for spending a solid block of high-priority time on this get in touch with me. If you'd like to help, for now I recommend setting up a dev environment (as laid out here and here).
Some technical changes (links to the issues in the issue tracker):
--Nick_Tarleton
This is something I care about quite a bit! Ideally, the three people above would scrutinize every change and determine whether or not it's worthwhile. In practice, they're all extremely busy, and as I'm only very busy I've been deputized to handle whether or not change will be accepted. If you're unsure about a change, talk to me.
Trike still maintains the site, and so it's still a Trike dev's call when a change will make its way to production (or if it's too buggy to accept). We've got a turnaround time guarantee from Matt for any time-sensitive changes (which I imagine few changes will be).
Social Changes
The rationalist community is a different beast than it was years ago, and many people have shifted away from Less Wrong. Bringing them back needs to involve more than asking nicely, or the same problems will appear again.
Epistemic rationality will remain a core focus of LessWrong, and the sorts of confusion that you find elsewhere will continue to not fly here. But the forces that push people from Main to Discussion to Open Threads to other sites need to be explicitly counteracted.
One aspect is that just like emotion is part of rationality, informality is part of the rationalist community.
--Alicorn
Another aspect is dealing with the deepening and specializing interests of the community.
A third aspect is focusing on effective communication. One of the core determinants of professional and personal success is being able to communicate challenging topics and emotions effectively with other humans. The applications for both instrumental and epistemic rationality are clear, and explicitly seeking to cultivate this skill without losing the commitment to rationality will both make LW a more pleasant place to visit and (one hopes) allow LWers to win more in their lives. But this is a long project, whose details this paragraph is too short to contain. I don't have a current anticipated date for when I'll be ready to talk more about this.
I expect to edit this post over the coming days, and as I do, I'll make comments to highlight the changes. Thanks for reading!