David Arenburg wrote in " Restrict up vote rights [1]":
I won't post examples because I don't want to create any Meta effects
This refers to increased voting and other attention [2] given to a post under discussion on a child meta site.
On reddit, some subreddits serve as meta-discussion areas, and some of these have a guideline to discourage "meta effect" or "sub invasion" by linking to a separate
read-only view
[3] on the hostname np.reddit.com
. ("NP" here stands for "no participation", not a complexity class.) This way, users have to manually remove the np.
from the URL before voting or commenting on a post.
Would it be a good idea for Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites to likewise have read-only sites such as np.stackoverflow.com
, np.softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
, and the like to discourage unwanted meta effect? Perhaps the existing code for
read-only mode
[4] can be reused.
I kinda feel like building this into the site would cause more confusion than it would save.
That said, nothing stopping you from building your own tool for this purpose if you think it's sufficiently important.
Heck, you don't necessarily even have to; systempuntoout's [1] venerable StackPrinter service works just fine for this:
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/130929/systempuntoout
np.
and reload. Thenp.
functionality just discourages unwanted drive-by participation. - Damian Yerrick