We want to make it easy to discuss the collective methodology of the site, and allow authors and commenters to improve the methodological standards we are applying.
But you also wrote
we might make it so that to create a comment that points out some meta-level feature about the discussion are taxed with a karma penalty. And so people can create meta-discussions, but they will have to pay a certain tax to do so.
Do these contradict each other? More generally, I don’t understand what’s bad about meta. “What environment encourages productive debate” is surely a very important question and possibly something we don’t talk about enough.
Yeah, they are both valid considerations, pointing in somewhat opposite directions. Though importantly the second paragraph was about someone bringing meta into an object-level discussion, whereas the first one was about generally making it easy for people to discuss the broad trajectory of the site. I am all in favor of people discussing more stuff in the meta section, but fairly against people derailing a conversation by talking about the moderation guidelines in the middle of an object-level discussion thread.
But you also wrote
Do these contradict each other? More generally, I don’t understand what’s bad about meta. “What environment encourages productive debate” is surely a very important question and possibly something we don’t talk about enough.
Yeah, they are both valid considerations, pointing in somewhat opposite directions. Though importantly the second paragraph was about someone bringing meta into an object-level discussion, whereas the first one was about generally making it easy for people to discuss the broad trajectory of the site. I am all in favor of people discussing more stuff in the meta section, but fairly against people derailing a conversation by talking about the moderation guidelines in the middle of an object-level discussion thread.