My own thoughts (not necessarily reflective of other site admins)
tldr:
meta is okay, just not front-and-center
yes it was bad that for awhile this meant it was hard to have meta conversation at all, but hopefully the frontpage redesign makes that easier, and we can further tweak that if need be. (Community discussion on personal blogposts in particular seems fine)
most important is for meta not to be what newcomers run into, since it sets a bad signal/precedent. (in particular, the rule we were striving for Frontpage posts was not “no discussion of community” but “no discussion of community that is only useful if you’re already in the community.” I think there was some poor communication about that concept that I contributed to.)
There’s certainly a lot of good meta conversation worth having. But, after several years of participating and observing community dynamics (both in LW and in Sunday Assembly), I have a strong prior that any given “explicitly meta” conversation is a weird attractor for discussion that doesn’t go anywhere. (i.e. often a benign demon thread)
Relatedly, I think the most important ways to make progress on community problems is to just do stuff, and talk about the doing of the stuff. If you keep your eye on that, then meta conversation will come up when it’s necessary.
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. If I arrive at a community where much of the talk is meta-discussion, my sense is “this is a community that doesn’t have anything to offer except meandering discussion about itself.” (And there are some people who’ve given feedback that this is why they don’t participate in LW anymore)
I do think it was a problem that, for several months, the Meta and personal blog pages felt like a backwater with no discoverability. My hope is that the redesign of the front page makes it easier to participate in them. (They’re still slightly hidden away from newcomers, but only a couple clicks away, and if you choose to leave your frontpage on “Community” settings I think it should be easy to follow most discussion)
In the spirit of Phil’s suggestion on the demon thread post, I’ll probably be limiting my engagement here to 2 additional responses, since I have a strong prior that meta-meta community posts in particular don’t often go anywhere useful. (But, if you have more specific community discussions to discuss, I’d be up for discussing that in future posts)
“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.)
My own thoughts (not necessarily reflective of other site admins)
tldr:
meta is okay, just not front-and-center
yes it was bad that for awhile this meant it was hard to have meta conversation at all, but hopefully the frontpage redesign makes that easier, and we can further tweak that if need be. (Community discussion on personal blogposts in particular seems fine)
most important is for meta not to be what newcomers run into, since it sets a bad signal/precedent. (in particular, the rule we were striving for Frontpage posts was not “no discussion of community” but “no discussion of community that is only useful if you’re already in the community.” I think there was some poor communication about that concept that I contributed to.)
There’s certainly a lot of good meta conversation worth having. But, after several years of participating and observing community dynamics (both in LW and in Sunday Assembly), I have a strong prior that any given “explicitly meta” conversation is a weird attractor for discussion that doesn’t go anywhere. (i.e. often a benign demon thread)
Relatedly, I think the most important ways to make progress on community problems is to just do stuff, and talk about the doing of the stuff. If you keep your eye on that, then meta conversation will come up when it’s necessary.
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. If I arrive at a community where much of the talk is meta-discussion, my sense is “this is a community that doesn’t have anything to offer except meandering discussion about itself.” (And there are some people who’ve given feedback that this is why they don’t participate in LW anymore)
I do think it was a problem that, for several months, the Meta and personal blog pages felt like a backwater with no discoverability. My hope is that the redesign of the front page makes it easier to participate in them. (They’re still slightly hidden away from newcomers, but only a couple clicks away, and if you choose to leave your frontpage on “Community” settings I think it should be easy to follow most discussion)
In the spirit of Phil’s suggestion on the demon thread post, I’ll probably be limiting my engagement here to 2 additional responses, since I have a strong prior that meta-meta community posts in particular don’t often go anywhere useful. (But, if you have more specific community discussions to discuss, I’d be up for discussing that in future posts)
“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.)