People often use quotes like that to paraphrase.

▲ tptacek 11 hours ago | parent [-]

This is an HN idiosyncrasy and if I have to adhere to it so does everybody else. :)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(The quote they created is also nowhere close to what I was saying or what I believe, but I'm not interested in litigating that.)

▲ DangitBobby 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't really understand the problem since you can read the comment and see it's not a quote, but I agree that you've proven it's a policy. Written English might benefit from a special syntax to denote something not intended to be a literal quote, but I guess writing "(paraphrased)" (not quoting you here) would suffice.

Edit: Funnily enough, I can't actually find this policy in the guideline. I see now that dang said it's actually not a guideline but telling people not to do it anyway is apparently a thing, which I find really fucking weird. Also funny that the same 'quote as framing' device (which I'm now avoiding) is used to paraphrase a position in the guidelines!

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

	▲	tomjakubowski 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that instance is more like quoting to indicate an example, not to paraphrase. like in Haskell-ish terms: `shorten :: String -> String shorten "Did you even read the article! It mentions that" = "The article mentions that"`