“That all said, the priority with LW right now is not to ban all meta conversation—it’s to make it so that Meta conversation isn’t the thing that newcomers are immediately confronted with when they arrive”—that’s an important clarification, although it does seem like there is a subset of meta which newcomers should encounter relatively quickly and that is the core principles of the community and what they are trying to achieve. Of course, this is usually established more through reading write-ups, then through discussion.
“And there are some people who’ve given feedback that this is why they don’t participate in LW anymore”—in the past, there were serious problems that needed to be addressed. So someone would post about it and then nothing would happen and then later someone else would post on the same thing and nothing would happen again. So I think that part of meta being so aversive was that a) it didn’t achieve anything in the past b) we kept repeating the same conversations.
Anyway, I should clarify that I’m not suggesting making meta any more visible (though I do think major site changes should be visible on the front page). I’m just trying to encourage people to consider the most important meta topics to discuss and start conversations on them, but not all at once as we don’t want to flood the site. I suspect that this kind of thinking is neglected; people tend to think, “What is frustrating me?”, not, “What is the most important discussion we could be having?”.
Yeah, previously a large part of meta was essentially “LW sucks”, which is a bad kind of meta. There are also other kinds of bad meta.
There are also good kinds of meta. Arguably, rationality itself may belong to this category. But I meant the kind that inspires people to do stuff.
I guess I tried to say that we need more good meta and less bad meta, but it’s a bit difficult to explain what exactly makes the difference. (People sometimes come up with rules like “it must include a proposal for how to do things, not just complaints”, but it is still possible to write a bad meta that formally fulfills the requirement.)
“That all said, the priority with LW right now is not to ban all meta conversation—it’s to make it so that Meta conversation isn’t the thing that newcomers are immediately confronted with when they arrive”—that’s an important clarification, although it does seem like there is a subset of meta which newcomers should encounter relatively quickly and that is the core principles of the community and what they are trying to achieve. Of course, this is usually established more through reading write-ups, then through discussion.
“And there are some people who’ve given feedback that this is why they don’t participate in LW anymore”—in the past, there were serious problems that needed to be addressed. So someone would post about it and then nothing would happen and then later someone else would post on the same thing and nothing would happen again. So I think that part of meta being so aversive was that a) it didn’t achieve anything in the past b) we kept repeating the same conversations.
Anyway, I should clarify that I’m not suggesting making meta any more visible (though I do think major site changes should be visible on the front page). I’m just trying to encourage people to consider the most important meta topics to discuss and start conversations on them, but not all at once as we don’t want to flood the site. I suspect that this kind of thinking is neglected; people tend to think, “What is frustrating me?”, not, “What is the most important discussion we could be having?”.
Yeah, previously a large part of meta was essentially “LW sucks”, which is a bad kind of meta. There are also other kinds of bad meta.
There are also good kinds of meta. Arguably, rationality itself may belong to this category. But I meant the kind that inspires people to do stuff.
I guess I tried to say that we need more good meta and less bad meta, but it’s a bit difficult to explain what exactly makes the difference. (People sometimes come up with rules like “it must include a proposal for how to do things, not just complaints”, but it is still possible to write a bad meta that formally fulfills the requirement.)