I am strongly opposed to this measure, because I believe it both treats symptoms rather than causes and is negative expected value for users.

[EDIT]: There was an html error in the original version of this comment, and so several paragraphs disappeared.

Beware Trivial Inconveniences seems relevant. I, for one, neither have a Reddit account nor visit that site, and would like to keep things that way. Even were I to make an account, to remain on top of meta discussions I'm involved in, I would have to regularly visit that thread, rather than just seeing it in my LW inbox. A predictable consequence of it being annoying is that less conversations will happen, and it's not clear to me that's a step in the right direction.

I think it's also worth considering the boundaries between meta conversations and 'object level' conversations. Anybody want to join a math club? seems, strictly speaking, like a meta conversation- but to move it offsite would totally kill it.

These two sentences stuck out to me:

Moreover, moderators can't easily ignore those conversations when they encounter them, because they're usually attacks on the moderators themselves

bitterly meta in a thread that's not originally about a LW site meta issue

If you look at a thread like Who owns LessWrong?, it's a meta conversation that shows up in Recent Comments just like the Recent Unpleasantness with V_V, but it's in its own thread. Does that make it the sort of thing that should be in Discussion, or is it the sort of thing you would want moved off site?

This is a perfect recipe for a flamewar taking over Top Comments even when most people don't care that much.

Would you characterize the Recent Unpleasantness as a flamewar, or are you thinking more of something like this?

I'm also curious about whether or not LW has a long tail. Are most comments on LW things that most users don't care about? Every now and then, I realize that I'm not voting as much as I could, and am thus slacking in being informative to other users. But when I go through Recent Comments to try and upvote or downvote, I find I often only care enough about ~2 comments out of 10 to upvote or downvote them, which implies that the majority of comments on LW are ones I don't have even a mild opinion about.