They matter just as much, especially on a nerd messageboard which is also not reality. The convention of not-aggro-paraphrasing-with-quotes is not aimed at your one thing, it's a result of long observation of its effects. And as I said, I don't like the weird punctuation prescriptivist part of it either but it's not really about the punctuation.
I acknowledged it's an obviously bad comment by suggesting you flag it and downvote it. It didn't really seem worth saying anything more since you pointed out the problem with replying to bad comments with bad comments yourself.
> I acknowledged it's an obviously bad comment by suggesting you flag it and downvote it.
Right so – "comments you think are bad" doesn't really sound like an acknowledgement it's an "obviously bad comment" to me, but I accept that's what you intended with it.
And I don't think "never quote anything unless it's a literal citation" is reasonable. The problem with "aggro-paraphrasing" is the "aggro", not "paraphrasing". I've paid attention to this since yesterday, and I see tons of people use citation marks for non-literal quotes in all sorts of ways, with no one objecting. Only one person who seems to object, who seems to go off on rather boring pedantics and accusations of bad faith with some regularity. This is just not a widely held view, nor reasonable.
They're just trying to make the entire world adjust to a personal pet peeve. Good luck with that.
And again, if you want to argue "your post was too aggressive": sure, that's reasonable. But "you didn't sufficiently account for a niche pet peeve": yeah nah, sorry, I can't agree with that.
I see tons of people use citation marks for non-literal quotes in all sorts of ways
That's why I said it's mostly about the paraphrasing and it makes sense to take it as such. Neither 'other people are doing it' (you didn't really provide an example of what 'it' is in this case) nor 'the other person started it' are all that important anyway. But if they were bad comments, hopefully you downvoted and/or flagged them.
adjust to a personal pet peeve.
It's certainly not my personal pet peeve. I've argued against it.
I mean, that's how the site works already. Your comment got downvoted, flagkilled and you even got a personal moderator scolding, pretty much the maximum penalty an HN comment can get.
In general, avoiding as many standard internet battletropes (calling strangers narcissists who need to get overthemselves, aggro paraphrase, 'good luck with that', etc) as one can manage makes for better comments and better writing (on a messageboard, a very low bar to trundle over as it is).
They matter just as much, especially on a nerd messageboard which is also not reality. The convention of not-aggro-paraphrasing-with-quotes is not aimed at your one thing, it's a result of long observation of its effects. And as I said, I don't like the weird punctuation prescriptivist part of it either but it's not really about the punctuation.
I acknowledged it's an obviously bad comment by suggesting you flag it and downvote it. It didn't really seem worth saying anything more since you pointed out the problem with replying to bad comments with bad comments yourself.