The actual guideline is “there is a convention on HN of asking users not to use quotation marks to make it look like they're quoting someone when they're actually not.” That clearly didn’t happen here because the commenter indicated what you literally said with ‘>’ and then put their paraphrase underneath it in quotation marks. No-one would have mistaken it for a literal quote.
If you think your position was misunderstood then that’s that’s the real issue, not punctuation usage. IMO it would be better addressed by engaging with the substance of the post (including the salient point that the Maher case is not comparable) rather finding some technical violation of HN common law to pick at. I’m sure there’s also a guideline against derailing substantive discussions into irrelevant picking over minor guidelines.
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".
I guess I'm pointing out that there are blessed uses of quotes aside from direct quotations and I don't understand why this particular thing has carve outs as being bad.
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.)