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HN Suggestion: Meta-Comments
We get lots of "This isn't Hacker News. Flagged." comments, even though it is explicitly discouraged in the FAQ. However, talking about what is and isn't HN is part of a community's social lubrication. I suggest we give such comments a home. Namely, in addition to the regular comments on a post's content, there be a collection of meta-comments which are there to discuss moderation, titles, whether a post is a dupe, and so forth.
Moderators can ruthlessly move comments from the "comments" to meta-comments as they see fit. That way, meta-comments don't detract from the normal discourse.
There's lots of potential tweaking available, such as allowing people to leave a meta-comment but not see them if they have less than a certain amount of karma, withholding karma from meta-comments, and so forth. I have no objection to not getting karma from meta-comments, as they are useful but hardly contributing to HN's stated purpose.
Any ways, that's my idea. A comments thread and a separate meta-comments thread for each story submitted.
- mbrubeck 17y agoIt works well for MetaFilter, which has http://metatalk.metafilter.com/ http://metatalk.metafilter.com/ for meta-metafilter posts.
- ggchappell 17y ago> Moderators can ruthlessly move comments from the "comments" to meta-comments as they see fit. What about the other direction?