It sounds like you feel that Hacker News would be a better forum for debate if people followed this procedure. I think we agree that Hacker News sometimes has a troll problem, and I've learned from you that part of that problem is that people here don't really know how to argue. Isn't going through all of this rigamarole a pain in the ass though? Do you really expect the best of human argumentation to come from a social news aggregator?