The dissolution stage is described in greater detail in the linked article. The presence of people who proudly say they never bothered to read the Sequences (available as a free book now) was a huge warning long ago, but we somehow bought the belief that caring about your garden is cultish. Well, the garden is quite trampled now.

I can imagine an improvement in creating specific subs for the "hardcore" topics.

EDIT:

I am not sure I understand Scott's explanation for the dissolution phase. He seems to suggest that it happens when "a tribe was never really that different from the surrounding population, stops caring that much about its rallying flag, and doesn’t develop enough culture". Yeah, but why does that happen?

Sometimes the difference really wasn't so big. Imagine a minority that is not that much different from he majority, but is isolated by a language barrier, and maybe both sides have a habit of avoiding each other, which all contributes to creating myths about how the other side is completely weird. -- Then at some moment people start interacting with each other, the minority learns the majority language, and suddenly they all see they were quite similar. And then the old tribal boundaries dissolve, to be replaced by new boundaries, e.g. along hobbies or social class.

But I don't think this aplies to LW. I mean, when I found LW, I was shocked to see that there actually exist people like me. (Hard to describe what exactly that means, other than "I know it when I see it".) And now, a few years later, I still perceive the huge difference between me and most of the society.

However, now the LW website is not literally the only place where I can meet "LW-style" people, because the rationalist diaspora has grown, and now I can meet them e.g. at SSC. There are also the meetups, and there are people I have met on the meetups that I would stay in contact with even if the meetups would dissolve. So the LW website no longer has a monopoly on the "LW-style" people.

But there is also another way how people can find out that they are not "really that different from the surrounding population" and that they don't care that much about their rallying flag... and that is when the community gets dilluted by the outsiders who never cared about the rallying flag, and who are closer to the general population than the old members. Then the community as a whole gets closer to the original population even if the original members didn't.

This seems similar, but there is a difference. In the second model, there are the old members who still remain different, only their community was sabotaged by the new members who "came, saw, and conquered" (not necessarily by intention). Even if they would want to start over, now they have a coordination problem, because the original rallying flag is not a good Schelling point anymore, because people now associate it with the dilluted version of the community.

Unlike Scott's explanation that people in the atheist community became bored with being only atheists, and decided to become SJWs instead because it seemed like more fun... I think it was actually the second kind of process. That the atheist community was joined by people who didn't care about atheism that much (that's not a strawman; some of them admitted it afterwards), and mostly saw it as a place where they could recruit for their own ideas. They came, converted a few members, tried to take over the whole community, found a resistance, created a schism, and now keep attacking the original group in frustration. So it's not like the old-style atheists became bored with atheism, instead the boredom with atheism came from people who never strongly identified as atheists, except instrumentally for a short time during the takeover attempt.

So far LW was successful at holding off these kinds of attack (some people even doubt they actually happened). The actual danger for us comes from... not exactly "normies", but rather from people somewhere on the scale between "LW-style" people and "normies". There is no clear dividing lines. So while "normies" will avoid this site, it may be attractive to people who are only "90% LW-ish"... and if this is something like a bell curve, they will soon make a majority, then the site will become attractive to people who are "80% LW-ish", etc. and then suddenly it is not the old community of "LW-style" people anymore, but it's not obvious where the line should have been drawn, because the process was so fluent.

EDIT2:

What I mean by "X% LW-ish" is something like "I enjoy talking with the smart people whom I find on LW, and I find some of their topics quite interesting, but I don't care about the artificial intelligence, and I am not that obsessed with increasing my rationality. I don't have time to read Sequences, but here are some interesting links that I wanted to share, and I would also like to debate personal opinions on X, Y, and Z." There is nothing wrong with that per se, and on some days I would enjoy that kind of debates, but I don't want to see LW replaced by this. I would like to see that on a different website, or if that is not possible, at least on a different sub within LW.