I just stopped myself from commenting on a thread because I was worried for my itty bitty karma score. I'm new, so my karma score is tiny. I'm new enough to know that I might not know all the relevant context, so I stopped myself in case what I was going to say was too obvious.
I wish that newbies could have a protected period from being downvoted to the pits of negative karma if the new person is clearly giving an honest effort. But at the same time, downvoting trolls makes very good sense. I realize it's not practical to separate out new people from potential trolls. So for now, I find that I am being very, very careful.
Nevertheless, do we want the new people to feel the need to be careful? (Yes, I know that other sites do this: I have a decent karma on slashdot. Is it what this site wants?)
I am new as well, and even under-versed in most of the common phrases. But I am starting to comment anyway because of the karma rating. My score does not mean much to me in terms of status, so I don't care if it drops to nothing. To me, it is a marker of how much of what I say is interesting to other people. It is feedback that allows me to improve. I cannot get that feedback unless I comment, so I comment.
Here is our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
(Carl's open thread for March was only a week ago or thereabouts, but if we're having these monthly then I think it's better for them to appear near -- ideally at -- the start of each month, to make it that little bit easier to find something when you can remember roughly when it was posted. The fact that that open thread has had 69 comments in that time seems like good evidence that "almost anyone can post articles" is sufficient reason for not bothering with open threads.)
[EDIT, 2009-04-04: oops, I meant "is NOT sufficient reason" in that last sentence. D'oh.]