Ask HN: Does HN Need a Meta Section?

I've only been an active member on HN for the past six months, but already I've seen dozens of discussions deteriorate into commentary on the HN voting system, ethics of downvoting, whether the comments themselves are worse than before, what can be done about it, and so on.

This is a problem. It derails useful discussions and it means that interesting meta-discussions sometimes get voted up higher than the actual discussion related to a link.

One way other sites deal with this problem is by having a "meta" section, for discussing the operation of the site itself. Stack Overflow quickly implemented one of these shortly after it launched, and Matt Haughey talked at SXSW about how important it was for Metafilter to have MetaTalk, a place for collecting bug reports and to get feedback on their algorithms and moderation.

Does HN need the same thing? Has it been discussed before? Is there some benefit I'm not seeing from keeping all the discussion in the main channel rather than having a side-channel for meta-discussion?