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gjm comments on question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yup, context matters. However, you should consider the possibility that an appreciable fraction of your audience will fail to read your mind, and will (consciously or not) take your "you people" as indicating hostility, which you probably don't want.
(Though ... it sounds as if you're talking about a use of the phrase with a rather different structure from the one we're discussing here: using it vocatively at the start of the sentence. "Hey, you people, listen up! Blah blah blah." or something like that. I don't think I've ever heard that done; it would strike me as rather odd, but not as hostile and dismissive in the same way as the sort of usage I thought we were discussing.)
No, I use it in the, ahem, traditional structure along the lines of "Now what you people fail to understand is that...".
I understand that some people might read it as hostility. That's fine. I usually scatter enough hints in the text for the clueful people to figure out I'm not actually foaming at the mouth, plus I prefer to have a bit of ambiguity mixed in -- it adds flavour :-)
(I am commenting only to remark that it was not I who downvoted you.)
Thanks for the concern :-) though I don't care much about downvotes.