[0]https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/07/18/...
It's not a jab at the parent comment, I am simply interested if it's some kind of cargo cult, or I may be missing something here.
Edit: In my head what I was trying to say was obvious. In hindsight it's not.
The practice started because text interspersed with long urls is difficult to read. It's a good solution, so everyone started doing it all the time. It's done in situations like this where it isn't strictly necessary probably because most of us are programmers and don't like making exceptions to a rule for specific circumstances. That's the theory I'm going with anyway.
[1] footnote
As for the footnote vs inline style I find ugly urls a distraction while reading and it's easy enough to match up footnote numbers.
It's similar to the way markdown allows for text decoration via asterisks (strong) and underscores (emphasis): people used such plaintext decorations long before any expectation that it could lead to more typical presentations such as bold and italic (italic and underline are grammatically interchangeable, and underscores approximate an underline).
``` Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email. ```
...at its core, Markdown was a codification of decades of habits found in README.txt files, and "footnote-style links" were unusual but relatively frequently used. They could be with numbers[0] or referring to a short abbreviation like [daring-fireball], and very likely the true origin was how a type-written page would have handled a footnote or reference.
[0]: http://example.com/ [daring-fireball]: https://daringfireball.com/
But seriously, footnotes keep the text cleaner.
But I digress :)
Long links in the middle of sentences or paragraphs are annoying. Since HN doesn't allow hyperlinking, having a list of links at the bottom is the least disruptive option.
Trust me, there was many a laugh at ourselves about that one.
Edit: This is what happens when you don’t consider alcohol essential: https://allafrica.com/stories/202006020490.html