The way I see “important meta” is something like “occassionally, a meta discussion is important enough that all the stakeholders should be able to weigh in on it, which means they need to know it exists.”
Typically, those discussions don’t seem to need addition help from the site to get noticed – I’m way more likely to notice important meta discussions (even on sites I only occasionally use), because people will post about it on facebook or in person or on other blogs. (Most often when the meta involves shifts in the social landscape aka drama, but even minor UI changes tend to generate more attention than most other kinds of posts).
The use case that seems important to resolve is when there are important site changes or community projects to weigh in on that aren’t easily accessible and/or exciting, but are nonetheless important. And in those cases I think the thing to do looks less like “promote it to frontpage” and more like “send a notification to everyone with at least 100 karma.”
The people who should see it are usually not newcomers (who don’t really have the context to weigh in), but instead people who are longtime community members but who don’t check the site that often.
(Occassionally there are meta-updates that are more like “announcements” than “discussions” that are relevant to newcomers, and in those cases I think we actually do typically briefly sticky those so there’s a decent chance of getting seen)
That all said, one of the upcoming changes is (most likely) going to be replacing “Curated” and “Recommended Sequences” with a more general purpose section called “Recommended”. Curated posts will still go there (and have the same process they do now), but so will other posts determined-via-magic (with some user settings configure that magic)
So I think that’d actually be a fairly good place for the occasional meta-discussion that is important, but that I’d want to direct attention to in a more targeted way.
The way I see “important meta” is something like “occassionally, a meta discussion is important enough that all the stakeholders should be able to weigh in on it, which means they need to know it exists.”
Typically, those discussions don’t seem to need addition help from the site to get noticed – I’m way more likely to notice important meta discussions (even on sites I only occasionally use), because people will post about it on facebook or in person or on other blogs. (Most often when the meta involves shifts in the social landscape aka drama, but even minor UI changes tend to generate more attention than most other kinds of posts).
The use case that seems important to resolve is when there are important site changes or community projects to weigh in on that aren’t easily accessible and/or exciting, but are nonetheless important. And in those cases I think the thing to do looks less like “promote it to frontpage” and more like “send a notification to everyone with at least 100 karma.”
The people who should see it are usually not newcomers (who don’t really have the context to weigh in), but instead people who are longtime community members but who don’t check the site that often.
(Occassionally there are meta-updates that are more like “announcements” than “discussions” that are relevant to newcomers, and in those cases I think we actually do typically briefly sticky those so there’s a decent chance of getting seen)
That all said, one of the upcoming changes is (most likely) going to be replacing “Curated” and “Recommended Sequences” with a more general purpose section called “Recommended”. Curated posts will still go there (and have the same process they do now), but so will other posts determined-via-magic (with some user settings configure that magic)
So I think that’d actually be a fairly good place for the occasional meta-discussion that is important, but that I’d want to direct attention to in a more targeted way.
Oooh, I like this. Fewer top-level sections seems good to me.