I'd only put things in Main if you're going to promote it (since you're doing it to get it promoted to RSS anyway)
Linkposts to Main seems like a reasonable makeshift solution to me.
I don't think we currently have a way to disable comments, and I'd rather build the change that lets us promote stuff in Discussion to the RSS, since that'll obviate the need.
The current amount of traffic certainly justifies consolidating the two channels.
Meh, my inner monkey wants things in the Open Thread, but my inner monk evaluates that a special announcement like a linkpost in discussion, with a standard recognizable format, would be the correct thing to do.
N° 2 my choice it is.
Linkposts to Main posts option means there will be two separate discussions for each Main post? (below the article itself, and below the linkpost) If yes, then option 1 seems much better.
How is 1 better in that regard? If there's a link in an open thread people can still have discussion about it there. (And meanwhile, Open Thread comments are way less visible than a top level link-post)
Another important feature about Link posts as applied to Less Wrong articles is that once you click on the link, you'll already be in a place where you can comment, so there's no reason to go back to the discussion-link post to comment on it.
Hi all,
We shut off Main back in February to force everything into Discussion, and I still think the Main/Discussion split should be replaced (by better use of the tagging system, or by different subreddits based more about the style of interaction that people are looking for than the content, or so on), but (as mentioned then) we're going to be using Main for posts we want to make sure get into the RSS feed.
This is awkward because everything else is in Discussion, and Main is still a weird visibility zone, where stuff in Main that isn't Promoted is sort of in limbo. There are ways to improve this long-term, but in the short term, it looks like there are some easy options:
1. Open Thread comments linking to new promoted Main posts
2. Linkposts that point to new promoted Main posts
3. Something else?
(As said before, this should hopefully be a temporary measure; if we add promoted posts in Discussion to the site RSS (github issue), then those posts will show up in Discussion and in the RSS and everything is great.)