You decide it's time for less meta, and more beta.
Counter-proposal: Everyone, let's just agree to downvote any discussion of moderation, moderators, downvoting, c?ns?rsh?p, and so on. Here's why:
Prolonged discussions about moderation attract the attention of three sorts of people:
However, any prolonging of the discussion just makes it worse. Shoot it. That is what the downvote button is for.
(Feel free to apply the above policy to this comment.)
I completely agree with your three points.
Now it seems to me the problem with meta comments is that they are more expensive than normal comments.
As an example, if I write "tomorrow a robot army from China will destroy the world", people can agree or disagree, upvote or downvote, but almost nobody thinks it is the topic which needs to be discussed, and there is almost zero risk that it will spawn half dozen meta articles tomorrow.
On the other hand, if I write "Eliezer is censoring this website and I am so going to write an article on Rational...
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.