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.
Perhaps we could have two separate sets of thumbs up/thumbs down buttons, one for object-level merit, i.e. how much you agree with what the post is saying, and another for meta-level merit, i.e. how much you think the post is contributing to the discussion and being respectful?