Now it seems to me the problem with meta comments is that they are more expensive than normal comments. [...] Then it seems to me the best solution is to make writing meta comments more expensive, too.
Upvoted for this, which is an admirably plausible formulation.
As for the proposed rule and policy, I continue to think that increasing compliance with "downvote what you want less of" would subsume most of the benefits of the various new policies being proposed, and I continue to be skeptical of the benefits of stating new policies where compliance with existing stated policies is the issue.
Then the right meta thing we need to do is: remind people that their (not) downvoting (or even upvoting of things they consider wrong, but feel it is fair to give them visibility because of some abstract principle) has consequences. Most obviously, the consequence of getting more of what they don't downvote, or even upvote.
Next thing would be to emphasise that there are different forms of criticism, and that well-written criticism is typically well accepted (see Holden). Therefore we do not have to pay attention to trolling-style criticism.
Then, if someone...
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.