[dang]

> it probably won't work

You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted.

That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and all the work on it. So, bad as things sometimes appear and critical as everyone sometimes sounds, it's worth remembering that HN has a track record of finding new things that work—for a while—at slowing decay.

[palish]

Check how long I've been here. Not only did I know all of that, but it's the entire reason why I left a reply, and why I've stayed on the site. The goal was to characterize the problem for you in a way that you may not have considered, and I was trying to be thorough about it. (I also tried to come up with some new idea so that it wouldn't read as a complaint, even if it was probably a bad one.)

Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.