It may be of benefit to have a different tag for quoting external sources too.
Most people here italicise quotes with asterisks. see http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc.
That's been my method as well. Easy enough to quote a block of text that way without having to manually format/indent and add >'s.
without having to manually format/indent and add >'s.
You just add one > at the head of the para, it's quicker than adding asterisks at either end. Reddit's version also nests quotes.
Just my two cents.
I just find the reddit markup for this is better, makes for better scanability of threads and takes less keypresses. Also allows for easy use of a user stylesheet on quotes or for HN to change the quote style.
Generally if there's a better way I prefer to use it. Clearly others are happy with the current ad-hoc method.