I apologize, there was a html error in my comment and so most of it was accidentally eaten; I recommend rereading it. In particular, I'm curious if you think the Recent Unpleasantness with V_V was a flamewar or not.
Do you agree, though, that the sporadic meta flame wars are a problem?
I disagree with the words "flame" and "a": I think that the meta discussions that generate the most heat are discussions about the use of moderator power, and I think those discussions are often gone about in a suboptimal manner. I think that there are significant cheap improvements to the way those discussions occur, and significant cheap improvements that make those discussions less frequent.
I don't think that meta discussions as a whole should be avoided, because there are many meta topics that are useful. If people get the sense that there is too much meta discussion going on, I suspect that's generally a disguised complaint that there's not enough object discussion going on, and it is better cured by subsidizing / generating object discussion than penalizing meta discussion.
Edited to add: I didn't elaborate on my disagreement with "a" enough. I think there are several related problems that meta discussions bring up, and I think that targeting those problems individually is superior to a blanket ban / penalization.
Yes, the recent unpleasantness was the reason I made this post. And I don't think there's much evidence to the effect that meta arguments happen more when there's less other content on the site; I think it flares up at pretty random intervals.
After a recent comment thread degenerated into an argument about trolling, moderation, and meta discussions, I came to the following conclusions:
Ideally, Less Wrong would implement a separate "META" area (so that people can read the regular area for all the object-level discussions, and then sally into the meta area only when they're ready). After talking to Luke (who also wants this), though, it seems clear that nobody is able to implement it very soon. So as a stopgap measure, I'm personally going to start doing the following, and I hope you join me:
Whenever a conversation starts getting bitterly meta in a thread that's not originally about a LW site meta issue, I'm going to tell people to start a thread on the LW Uncensored Reddit Thread instead. Then I'm going to downvote anyone who continues the meta war on the original thread.
I know it's annoying to send people somewhere that has a different login system, but it's as far as I can tell the best fix we currently have. Since some meta conversations are important, I'm not going to punish people for linking to meta thread discussions that they think are significant, and the relevant place for those links is usually the Open Thread. I don't want LessWrong to be a community devoted to arguing about the mechanics of LessWrong, so that's my suggestion.
Thoughts? (And yes, this thread is obviously open to meta discussion. I'm hopefully doing something constructive about the problem, instead of just complaining about it, though.)
EDIT: Changed the link to the uncensored thread more specifically, at Luke's request; originally I linked to the general LW subreddit, which is more heavily moderated.