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Comment by qez | Hacker News Reader

He didn't misrepresent or disagree with the author. He added extra commentary on something the author brought up.

The lack of context reltated to what the author wrote is a sin of omission -- because anyone reading a top-level comment that begins with a quote (like this) is, to a first approximation, going to imagine the commenter is responding to the position of the author.

I think that’s a good reason to read the linked article before drawing conclusions about its contents from discussion threads. Having read the article first, I understood immediately that the comment was not misrepresenting anything from the article, and that their commentary bolsters the point made there.

And you don’t necessarily have to read the article before comments. I often don’t! But when I encounter something in comments which seems incongruous with what I’d expect or hope to find in the article, that’s a good prompt to go ahead and read it to gain context.

A sin or lie by omission requires intent, and the OP stated their intent was not to misrepresent the author.

That is not how quotation marks are designed to work.

The words offered up as a quote are meant to represent the views of the person being quoted. In this instance that is clearly not the case.

This is a perfect example of how quotes can be used to misrepresented a view.

To be fair, they used `>` to quote the article, and then included the article's `"` to indicate that the article itself quoted someone else.

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