There are various people who feel that Lesswrong degraded in the last year. In the same timeframe more and more discussions moved into the open thread model and open threads became weekly instead of monthly.
I suggest to counteract that trend by opening all discussions per default on Discussion instead of opening them in weekly open threads. Having the topics in discussion makes it easy to browse the list of topics and choose the headline that are of interest, even if the thread got opened two weeks ago.
I'd guess that the decline is largely due to people posting content on personal blogs, Facebook, etc. Every day I see a lot of interesting, rationality-relevant posts on Facebook from people that are connected to LW. I think those posts would be better if posted (or cross-posted) on open threads here, since that would make them visible to more people and allow for better commenting.
Maybe we could shift to a more link-based model, like what Hacker News has?