Thoughts?
I'm indifferent.
Also, I'm not quite sure what the point of this is.
Our stated downvote policy is "downvote what you want less of."
If we don't want to see "meta" discussions on LW, it follows that we should downvote them.
If enough people follow this policy and share this judgment (net), meta discussions will quickly be downvoted to invisibility. If not, then they won't.
Since meta discussions aren't quickly being downvoted to invisibility, I infer that not many people share this judgment and/or that not many of the people who do share it follow existing stated policy. Either way, it would surprise me if stating a new policy changed much of anything, though I don't object to you trying the experiment.
That said, committing to following existing downvote policy (either instead of or in addition to) might do more good.
Along the same lines, encouraging downvoting... for example, by periodically praising in public users who have used a lot of downvotes, if there's some way of looking that up.. might be a good idea.
I also suspect that this whole concern with whether a discussion is "meta" or not is serving as an indirect measure of discussion quality. I distrust optimizing for indirect measures generally, as it tends to decouple the correlation more than it tends to optimize for what I actually care about.
That said, I admit that "tends to" != "always" and this might be one of the exceptions. Again, I don't object to you trying the experiment, though I expect the results to be indeterminate.
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.