Making up quotes like this is against HN guidelines (and common decency).
Moreover there's nothing in the guidelines about "making up quotes" (which again isn't a reasonable interpretation of what that is), whereas there are actual, explicit guidelines against addressing yourself to unreasonably interpreted versions of other people's comments.
You're right that it isn't explicitly mentioned in the site guidelines, but those aren't a list of proscribed behaviors but a set of values to internalize. I'd say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" covers this case pretty squarely.
And virtually anyone in any argument could insist, tediously, that those disagreeing with them have failed to interpret with sufficient charity.
But it's one thing to note that as a hypothetical possibility, and another entirely to point to something that's actually a clear cut offense. I don't think I twisted or misrepresented anything, and no one seems to be suggesting the anything was actually misrepresented or misinterpreted so much as they're using this occasion as a jumping off point to litigate the abstract principle. Which I don't think is a constructive use of anybody's time, which is why this is a bad norm that shouldn't be observed.
No, that is what I'm suggesting. Your comment reads as a quote. After reading it, I went to the linked page and looked around for the context. Turns out, there was no context for that quote, because it's not a quote, because those words aren't actually in the original text.
I'm asking whether, even a person who wasn't making a reasonable interpretation of what I was saying, would have been misled by the way I characterized Comcast's position. Is there a significant difference between the way I phrased Comcast's position on whether or not they were exhorting their customers to purchase a new modem, and the way they actually phrased it? Because I don't think there is.
You're spending a lot of time prosecuting this point, and requiring time to be spent by others who care about HN being better than other online communities.
Whether or not some hypothetical person not making a "reasonable interpretation" would have been misled, or whether it's reasonable that a reader had to spend time searching for the quote to verify it to realize that it was not actually a quote (and how many others would have bothered to do that), are matters that we could spend many more hours debating.
Or, you could just accept that it's better to refrain from misquoting people in future and we could all get on with our lives.
All it would have taken you was to preface the "quote" with something like "the response, which effectively amounts to saying...", and it would have saved everyone the bother.
C'mon, is this really a hill you want to die on? Maybe let it go :)
I got bit by this a bunch when I first got on HN; it was surprising to me how seriously it was taken. But it is, and it's not hard to work around.
If the object of the rule is to produce derails like this, it's doing more harm than good. So unless someone wants to explain how it's invocation in this thread improved the quality of conversation about Comcast's javascript injection policy, I would encourage others to join me in not observing the norm.
> The gist of the HN community's opinion is, "don't use quotation marks when paraphrasing."
> Lately the Democrats approach has been, "oppose Trump at every turn."
However, when paraphrasing a specific individual, it is frowned upon at best[1][2], and considered intentionally misleading at worst[3], to put paraphrases in quotes.
> pvg said, "I don't care what HN thinks, I'll do what I want."
> pvg continued with, "no one else cares what HN thinks either."
Contrast that with,
> pvg said that "only harcore lispers" care about how paraphrasing works.
In the last example, you can clearly tell the direct quote from the paraphrase. This is very important when communicating someone else's ideas.
Regardless of hard and fast "rules" of punctuation and grammar, you have a large number of people calling your writing misleading, confusing, and inaccurate. Clear communications should be the goal of any writing; wouldn't you be best served by hearing and incorporating this feedback?
[1] MLA: "Paraphrases and summaries do not use quotation marks" - http://www.lmu.edu/Assets/Academic+Affairs+Division/Academic...
[2] Purdue: "Indirect quotations are not exact wordings but rather rephrasings or summaries of another person's words. In this case, it is not necessary to use quotation marks" (note that no example of indirect quotations include quotation marks) - https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/
[3] "But then there's a long slide through confusion and bias into intentionally misleading quote-mangling and outright fabrication" - http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/17/gay_tal...
A lot of zeros and ones are being spilled on behalf of the abstract principle how quotes can be hypothetically used abused and interpreted, but none of the 40+ comments beneath my now-flagged paraphrase of Comcast's statement is actually arguing that my paraphrase was in any way distorting or misleading.
So I question the value of this norm, if the practical way it tangibly cashes out is in the form of extremely long derailments substantively unrelated to the the comment that caused the rule to be invoked.
It's just a dumb, arbitrary rule. It serves no purpose beyond facilitating righteous rebuke. You can make a better rule dealing with the underlying behaviour while oxygen deprived from screaming at dang about HN's political bias.
> not how writing or paraphrasing works anywhere else
That's simply false. If you want to use Reddit et al as your standard reference on the use of language and punctuation, have at it. But you can't reasonably expect every other forum to use that lowest common denominator. Railing against simple, longstanding house rules like this is just pointless contrarianism.
In terms of what contexts one should keep in mind when interpreting comments with good faith to come to a most reasonable interpretation of what they are saying, the way language is used on reddit is probably a much more reasonable benchmark than MLA style guides.
No, it isn't. I'm saying what somebody else is saying, in their voice. This goes in quotes, because it's someone else's speech, even if it's my version of their speech. The fact that they didn't actually say it comes from context. Punctuation is not semantic markup.
This doesn't come from reddit, it comes from, you know, the way people actually write. The fact that it requires repeated and lengthy explanations is a pretty decent indication it's not how anyone else writes.
Now, I think that it’s a fair argument that a web forum needn’t have the same formality as other written word, but your assertion that “it’s not how anyone writes” is clearly untrue.
And just as a single data point, I expect when someone uses quotes even on the web that they are asserting a verbatim quote.
I certainly default to assuming it does and in many contexts it is an explicit rule.
I don't understand how you've refuted that while also saying they sometimes don't. Are we arguing about contexts here? My claim is almost trivial - nobody reasonably familiar with English thinks quotes imply a verbatim quote. That's just not what quotes are for.
Getting back to the actual point, in formal writing, quotation marks are definitely considered to delimit actual quotes. That's where their name comes from and that's their purpose. If you want to paraphrase or otherwise interpret what was said you just work it in without quotes.
Personally, I relax my expectations in informal contexts if I don't know the person or their writing habits, but I'm just being pragmatic. In other words, the rule doesn't change, it's just not always followed.
That your position is that I’m in the minority on this is doubly surprising to me given that’s what all the style guides and my high school English teachers taught me.
"In English writing, quotation marks are placed in pairs around a word or phrase to indicate:
Quotation or direct speech: Carol said "Go ahead" when I asked her if the launcher was ready. Mention in another work of a title of a short or subsidiary work, like a chapter or episode: "Encounter at Farpoint" was the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Scare quotes used to mean "so-called" or to express irony: The "fresh" apples were full of worms."
Even 'direct speech' is at odds with 'verbatim quote' and that's the first thing there. Direct speech can be completely made up.
"AP, MLA & CMS" are an absurd counterpoint that falls well within 'that's not how anyone writes'. They are, if anything, lengthy exceptions to how anyone writes.
It's a deeply silly argument and my point is 'an internet messageboard should not be regulating punctuation'. It should, as this one usually does, try to regulate behaviour.
(For what it's worth: this little subthread is about 10x more interesting than the story and the rest of the thread it's attached to).
Don't be an ass.
Don't call other people asses.
Don't complain about votes.
And then:
Some weird thing about quotes we can't even sort out as well-intentioned nerds who love to talk about rules.
I don't think that's a good rule. I think what it's trying to address is probably a good rule. But it's addressing it in the dumbest possible way.
That's fine, when you're writing fiction. But in most online forums, fiction is frowned upon.
Still, it would have been clearer to say something like "Exactly. And the response, which amounts to 'we're not trying to sell you a modem, we're just encouraging you to strongly consider buying a new one', is such a hair-splittingly asinine response considering the rather serious breach of trust posed by the notification system."
Also, for what it's worth, I do agree 100% with your argument there :)
However, I think (1) few are as lucid as you on that particular point and (2) whatever the merits of this as a general debate, and I think there is some merit, I think the question is whether this norm improves conversation in a thread like this. I think it was invoked frivolously, spawned a long, 50+ comment chain, and it didn't clear up any of the confusion that it seems like the norm is supposed to be designed for.
As more Comcast customers receive JS-based notices like these injected into their normal web traffic, any enterprising jerk can clone the message, change the links to point to their own phishing site, change or omit the phone number, and snag a whole bunch of unsuspecting Comcast customers.
To be a devil's advocate, Comcast customers have been phished before via email too:
http://technology.pitt.edu/news-and-alerts/phishing-alert-em...
...and then there's the various phone and even door-to-door scams, but I'd consider the latter to be much harder to do.
Well, what I meant (within the response length constraints of Twitter) was that we're not saying you can only buy it from us. Just that the customer needs to buy it someplace. That way a customer can do as the wish - ranging from buying a used one on eBay to getting a new one from Amazon or Best Buy.
Ultimately the objective is to ensure a customer is on a device that can (1) deliver the performance for which they pay and (2) is up to date technically (i.e. supports IPv6 and channel bonding) and is supported by the vendor (i.e. software updates & bug fixes).
One of the big risks we have to help mitigate is when a device goes EOL, which means no more software updates, and a security or significant performance issue arises in the future. By proactively beginning the replacement process this helps minimize any future impact when it is a major issue like that. So taking action gradually on a proactive basis prevents a more severe impact later on. In many cases, these are DOCSIS 2.0 devices and that technology and often the software is from 2001, the same year as the 1st gen iPod and when Windows XP was released.
Eventually a modem will go into End-of-Service (EOS) status. At that point there is a definite date/time limit for the device, after which it is de-provisioned from the network and the customer must replace it to continue service. This has been the case in the past with DOCSIS 1.0 and 1.1 devices for example, after years of work to encourage customers to replace them.
See also https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/end-of-life-devices and the start of the EOL/EOS process for DOCSIS 1.1 devices https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27473499-Speed-Heads-Up-Ti... and https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28497383-Speed-Upgrade-You... and https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30524429-Equip-Reminder-Pl... and https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30450278-Speed-Heads-Up-Ti...
Unless I’m misunderstanding, this was not causing such a problem. Casting it as a customer good is rhetorically amusing, and probably holds water with people who are predisposed to agree with you, but I can make any number of morally bankrupt decisions using exactly the same logic. You have simpler ways to deliver this message, that do not cause nearly as much harm to your customer and do not require you to intercept and modify their traffic.
And mail pieces don't produce the potentially rather widespread indignation that traffic injection does. Granted, I don't see the harm in it that a lot of people here do. Unencrypted traffic is unencrypted traffic - open to tampering by anyone, not just Comcast, and for many less innocuous reasons than the one for which you've chosen to do so. But with Let's Encrypt, browser manufacturers, and friends leading the charge toward TLS everywhere or as nearly so as is practical, and with most sites that most people use already employing TLS, the attack surface is closing for even an other-than-innocuous variant of your notification methodology. Of course, that also means that that methodology itself is reaching a natural end-of-life, as it cannot work anywhere that TLS exists, and the majority of the web where it does exist continues to grow. If this low-latency notification scheme is of unique value to your business, then now is the time to consider replacing the outdated technology that underpins it with something which will continue to work reliably over the next decade or two.
All that said, I appreciate your decision to engage in this forum. That's unprecedented in my experience from someone in a position like yours, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of it.
Lots of reasons, including years of experience with response rates for particular types of messages / calls to action. Clearly one particular communications channel won't work for everyone - each person has their own preferences. One of the things we're working on is to better enable you to control just that - basically one person may ask for SMS messages, another alerts via their mobile app, another via email, another via phone call, etc. You can see the beginnings of that in MyAccount / Settings / Communication & Ad Preferences.
> But with Let's Encrypt, browser manufacturers, and friends leading the charge toward TLS everywhere or as nearly so as is practical, and with most sites that most people use already employing TLS, the attack surface is closing for even an other-than-innocuous variant of your notification methodology.
Agree. And more TLS is better IMHO. I also like the work that Let's Encrypt has been doing - they've had a really big impact on the adoption of TLS. (See also http://labs.comcast.com/innovation-fund-spotlight-lets-encry...)
> Of course, that also means that that methodology itself is reaching a natural end-of-life, as it cannot work anywhere that TLS exists, and the majority of the web where it does exist continues to grow. If this low-latency notification scheme is of unique value to your business, then now is the time to consider replacing the outdated technology that underpins it with something which will continue to work reliably over the next decade or two.
You bet - totally agree! One of the places we're engaging to try to do that is in the IETF's CAPPORT working group and I think the charter describes reiterates all the points you made: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/capport/about/
> All that said, I appreciate your decision to engage in this forum. That's unprecedented in my experience from someone in a position like yours, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of it.
My pleasure & thanks for being a customer that's willing to offer constructive criticism. :-)
The fact that Comcast has and abuses its monopoly is bad enough. That you would try to standardize your abusive behavior is appaling.
This reminds me of the part in Romeo & Juliet where Sampson says "I do not bite my thumb at thee, but I do bite my thumb."
As other commenters have mentioned, these are such small distinctions to legitimize something as fundamentally troubling as javascript injections.
Here's what a customer should do:
Just file a complain. Via snail mail. To the FCC. Include screenshots of VP explaining how this is all ok.
After that the customer should enjoy the show. I'm sure at least the customer is going to be provided a top tier service for the rest of his life in any comcast service region. Most likely for free.
This is how one teaches companies to behave. He or she finds a pressure point and exploits it. It does not matter that the opponent is 350lb gorilla. Small joint manipulation by a 95lb girl puts that gorilla on its back. For Comcast, VZ, etc that pressure point is a snail mail complain to the FCC. For national banks, it is the OCC. It works every time it is tried. What does not work is bitching about it on HN.
Exactly. And the response, "we're not trying to sell you a modem, we're just encouraging you to strongly consider buying a new one" is such a hair-splittingly asinine response considering the rather serious breach of trust posed by the notification system.