•Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.

I don't think this is a practical idea. The site is hostile enough to new users who lack much rationality knowledge and perspective on the content. The Open threads (and even moreso the Stupid Question threads) give people a place to pose questions and try out ideas that they aren't confident enough in to make into Discussion posts. People are less harsh in those threads (although I've seen people be harsh in stupid questions threads) and it provides a chance to participate in content without having read the 1700 pages of The Sequences or having lurked on the site for 2+ years.

These are the exact three points that I wanted to voice. The fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and seeing articles, the fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and participating in discussions. That our landing page is a navigation list and not a a set of recent articles, the way any other group blog website would have, has irked me since the previous skull graphic was introduced.

This wouldn't change the need to scroll or click, since the front page, AND "Main", show only promoted articles, and promotion appears to be based on either being written by a MIRI staffer, or being some sort of general notice about an event or job opportunity, rather than having to do with quality of content.

(I don't even know what the difference is between "promoted" and "featured", or why we have both categories.)

I think a better improvement would be to automatically insert a summary break after the first paragraph for all posts that have no summary breaks, and/or to have a forum index that listed just the post titles. MIRI staff are especially guilty of posting huge articles with no summary breaks.

A more ambitious change would be to choose admins from the active forum participants to promote things to main. I get the impression that the LW admins don't participate much on LW. I haven't been around much myself lately, so I say that with low confidence.

My impression is that people are reluctant to post in Main for three reasons:

• Less likely to be seen, because everyone pays more attention to Discussion, because people are reluctant to post in Main.
• Fear of losing a ton of karma because of the 10x rule.
• Fear of being Not Good Enough For Main.

Merging Main and Discussion would deal with the last of those. The first is clearly parasitic on the other two so we probably needn't worry about it independently, and in any case merging Main and Discussion would make it go away.

The second would remain, I think. If we merge Main and Discussion -- and perhaps even if we don't -- I suggest that the "Main post karma multiplier" should be substantially reduced. Maybe 2 or 3 would work well. If we don't merge Main and Discussion, I would also suggest applying the same karma multiplier to posts in Discussion.

Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.

I'd say the opposite: the open threads are the part that's working. So I'd rather remove main/discussion and make everything into open thread, i.e. move to something more like a traditional forum model. I don't know whether that's functionally the same thing.