I think this has at least some truth to it. Keep in mind that there is an IRC channel, though I am not sure how much it gets used. I would endorse the creation of subreddit for rationalists (which would encourage all manner of offtopic discussions) as opposed to a subreddit for discussion of rationality.

Two corrections: I think you mean 'bonding' in the title, and I think you mean 'price' not 'prise' in the 2nd to last paragraph.

I'm not really sure how obvious the need for a more engaging social community is. I suppose it depends on exactly what one sees the purpose of the site to be. The focus I'm mostly interested in is developing solid resources for good reasoning in various areas and reaching a large and diverse audience with them.

I'm thinking the resource developing part as basically something like how a science journal works. People come up with stuff, other people question it, and stuff gets hopefully iterated into better stuff. Good science journals generally have some balance between adversity and agreeing to common conventions. When people form a tight social community, they might start polarizing against the outside and producing groupthinky junk instead of argument-hardened stuff.

Also not sure about the community aspect for the audience thing. Basically the site should have some number of people writing useful posts, some more active participants giving feedback and having discussions, and a large number of readers who can hopefully make use of the stuff. It'd also be very nice to have people who actually do stuff on the outside participating, either doing serious scholarship or real-world empiricism, and distilling ideas from there into site content. Unfortunately this favors people who do a lot of stuff outside the forum and bring in the outside insights, while there's a lot less main content to be made by just puttering around with in-forum stuff.

So cultivating a somewhat dry atmosphere might actually be an advantage, if it could be used to encourage people to bring in high-impact content based on research outside the site, to maintain the sort of constructively adversarial air useful science tends to emerge from and to keep the general tone sufficiently broad that the content is accessible to a diverse audience.

To compare to another group:

The lack of social network aspects at Wikipedia are often cited as something it needs, but attempts to start stuff like that have frequently crashed and burned. Whenever "we need to do something" springs up, that's a frequent option for "this is something, therefore we must do this." (Current "we need to do something" this is being mooted as the magical answer for: decline in editor numbers.)

That said, there is still a strong community feel ... and it particularly applies when we meet other Wikipedians in person. This carries back over to dealing with Wikipedians we've only met online, and leads to anticipation of future meetups being good experiences. And all this does in fact appear to further writing an encyclopedia, which is the original point.

So for LessWrong, this suggests: more meetups in more places.

How about an off-topic section, like the discussion section, in which posts and comments can be voted on and receive scores, but votes do not affect karma? (I'm guessing this was the solution you had in mind, plus or minus some details around the karma handling).

What about a whole "sub-site" for this kind of stuff? Like a forum with structured subject fields. I use Arch Linux, and most Linux distros have such a structure. See Arch's HERE and, for a comparison and much larger distro's setup, see Ubuntu's HERE.

I propose it because I think the structure is nice and provides what is being sought after -- a place for serious, problem-solving (like the boards for hardware, networking, and kernel issues) and fun (in Arch, forums like "Try This" and (duh) "Off-Topic").

The advantage is that stuff gets contained and the top-level and discussion boards aren't flooded with stuff people don't care about if they came for rationality. You could also follow topics you're interested in (I follow an Arch forum on Desktop Screenshots, as I'm interested to see what people do with their organization for example).

I think a "Users' forum" template is, essentially, what's being suggested by the post author HERE. I'm a member of tons of forums and they all have something like this -- a place for problem solving and a place for personal stuff. Woodworking forums have places to talk about the new tools you just bought or share pictures of your projects for example.

Oh, perhaps this would be quite restrictive and/or controversial based on various opinions of the particular media avenue... but what about a private Facebook group for LW users? You could start discussion threads, post pictures... just another thought.

Would an off-topic thread make sense?