It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a common convention. So were asterisks to display a bulleted list, blank lines to separate paragraphs, and indenting 4+ spaces to write code.

It's a good example of "pave the path" design philosophy, where you do what users are already doing rather than trying to impose some platonic ideal of what the world should be like. And it works quite well at that.

▲ reaperducer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media

For those of you who weren't there:

  *bold*

  _underline_

  ~strikethrough~

  /italics/

  > Quotation

  - list
  - list
  - list

I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.

	▲	nostrademons 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Your quotation and list syntax should work out of the box in most Markdown flavors (HN has a very non-standard and crippled version - basically nothing other than italics, paragraphs, and code/preformatting works.) Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an <em> (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.
	▲	dingaling 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But Usenet style didn't have a trendy name, an 'inventor' or Github stars. So it didn't exist.

▲ singpolyma3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Stepped right on the rake though because it uses sigils which were common, but requires they be used in uncommon ways (by doubling etc) which it why most chat UIs don't actually use markdown

	▲	packetlost 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Somehow basically only Discord gets it almost perfectly right though.