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.
OK. I agree this is a legitimate issue with the proposal, but it's the best idea I know of that can be implemented without site changes (and we all know how easily site changes happen).
Do you agree, though, that the sporadic meta flame wars are a problem? (If not, it's worth noting that other people do find it a significant ugh field- beware trivial inconveniences to their use of the site too.)
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.