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.
Online communities often deteriorate when they become more popular. Some of it is because of regression to the mean. Another reason is that people in small groups tend to put in more effort for the group because everyone knows everyone else, while people in large groups just look out for themselves and treat interactions as one-shot. If you agree with that view of the problem, then the right solution might be something like subreddits.