I fully disagree when you say that if you want things to change you have to go to discuss this on SE. The entire point is that SE is not just "SE policies" and "SE moderators": SE is first and foremost users and these users have their right to read criticism about SE on HN / reddit / blogs / etc. And the day a topic shall pop-up on meta saying that some introspection from SE may be needed, the more users have read well-articulated blogs entries and great comments explaining what they find very wrong on SE, the more likely they are to upvote these suggestions on meta. You're not an island and you to realize your most important users have a very vocal voice outside of SE and that this voice does have an influence.
This isn't my opinion, so I don't know what you're disagreeing with. Would you expect HN to change because of comments you read on Stack Overflow? Of course not. Everyone is perfectly welcome to discuss things where and whenever they want, but ultimately the ideas need to be discussed by the community of people who actually use SE sites. So yeah, I fully agree that you can go ahead and discuss things as much as you want here on HN and on blogs. I join in that sort of thing all the time. But if you want things to actually change, those ideas need to be posted and discussed among the community of SE users.
I would absolutely expect HN to change because of discussion about HN on StackOverflow. Why? Because a lot of smart nerds talking about it could have something useful to say. Smart product managers don't wait for their users to come to them with suggestions.
