I believe it is useful if you want to demonstrate that your post refers directly to another post. In my humble opinion it is very useful, for instance, if you take a long time to reply or if there were several posts between your post and the one that you want to refer to. I was convinced that this is the purpose of the quote function, and I thought that this is just common sense. I was not aware of any other "netiquette".

Nevertheless, recently I have been approached by an insecure poster who took offence at me using this function and quoting one of his posts:

"Do not quote me! I don't want anything to do with you!" As if quoting him meant that I wanted anything to with him! It was, of course, with regards to content, just about the topic at hand, and nothing personal from my side.

To be fair, I should add that I got along fine with said poster, at least for a while, after an exchange of a few "private" messages.

I do wonder, however, how other members of this forum feel about this. Is it considered impolite to quote someone? And, if you think so, what would you do instead?

Just stating that your post refers to post #xyz, it seems, is a rather clumsy solution to the problem. Especially if the respective post was several pages before in the thread.