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.
The open threads are the last remaining useful part of the site (they're the only thing I come here for now it looks like the rationality quote threads have stopped), and they've become much better since becoming weekly. I think you have the causation backwards.
Why do you think rationality quote threads have stopped? They're monthly, which means the next one should be up in a day or so.