I hate that HN does that to anyone. It should be reversed only for spam bots and obvious bad faith participants, not someone with an unpopular opinion trying to have a conversation. I've encountered it before too. Sorry that it happened to you. You may want to lodge a complaint with dang so that he understands it's not a good mechanism.

I definitely think that on the outset, it looks weird that 3Taps ended up taking PadMapper's heat, but I think that 3Taps wanted to become a generalized thing-as-a-service vendor. It's possible that PadMapper wasn't 3Taps's only customer for the CL feeds. As PadMapper wasn't contacting CL's computers without authorization, it makes sense that CL had to change the target to 3Taps. At that point, PadMapper would've seen that scraping CL meant a near-impossible legal challenge for a startup and been wise enough not to implement their own solution.

This is all just speculation, but I doubt that 3Taps stuck its neck out for the sole benefit of PadMapper.