I used to police until I called out a new account that was literally copying and pasting the same stuff from a FB doc about privacy settings.

Then other hours old accounts staring commenting I should be banned for calling someone out.

You're still allowed to reply to their post quotes from the article that make it clear that they didn't read the article. I've also just done the "I know it's against the rules but did you read the article?" thing in the past. Haven't gotten banned yet.

I do wonder what the point of that rule is.

"Did you even read the article" is a cheap shot that commenters routinely take at each other. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand, so it adds noise, not signal. Since it's a putdown, it provokes others and degrades discussion. If you take out the cheap shot and preserve the correcting information, the comment becomes better in every way.

You can think of it as a special case of this rule: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." But it's a special case worth singling out, because it's so common, and it's bad for HN in two ways: mean and predictable.

I think that's fair, as some people miss key quotes while scanning the article.