I'm sure you wrote this in good faith, but there weren't parens in the original comment. They only appeared in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19470714. The odd thing is that eli_gottlieb was making an unrelated point at the time (a strange and almost endearingly paranoid one, but that's another story).

This looks like a case of the internet snark trope where people use quotation marks to put nasty words in others' mouths, leading to misunderstanding and unfairness. That's why we've long asked users not to do that: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... It has never been in the official guidelines but it's been a bit of case law on this site for a long time.

I guess a troll is going to troll, but the idea that some coded message was in my comment is just insane.

I unequivocally deny any use of “triple parens”. Full stop.

Could an admin with access to edit history please straighten this out?

Alright, I checked the logs. There were never any parentheses in that comment. kjbfojbejib made two edits, but only to add to the text. Both additions were to the part about other businesses in the same neighborhoods, i.e. they were not part of the disputed text.