but you can find the main point in 3 seconds - it's in the second line, on it's own, with a symbol beside it. Then I get into the story. You can choose to follow along or not afterward - you've gotten the most important point right away.
on edit: by quote symbol I mean this is the point that someone else in the parent comment or the article made that I am going to respond to in my following bit of text.
So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall, to use a convention that few people have ever used. If HN had a basic quote function it wouldn't matter.
My favorite writing tip is knowing one’s audience. (:
The ">" is ubiquitous in email, usenet, Markdown, Github and Discord, which are more familiar. It seems to be a widely used convention here on HN as well, even though HN software doesn't highlight it.
It's baked into a lot of modern software due to long-standing convention for about half a century.
Nowadays that software includes anything taking input with a vague similarity to Markdown. There's a lot of that about.
Consider me your quote symbol iconoclast. There's no reason for > to mean quote in a system that doesn't implement quotes. It's just a cultural construct being followed 'because thats how it was'.
That's the point. It doesn't have to "do anything" in software or be "implemented" to be useful - it has shared meaning in people's minds.
You're reminding me of the small child who receives a non-electronic action figure for Christmas and immediately asks, "but what does it do?"
Put it like this: it is connected to an actual function, it's just that that function is in people's minds.
As for people getting offended, I think you might be projecting. Let's look at how part of this conversation might have played out in an alternate universe:
> I think it's actually a carry over from reddit, where it activates the quote, while here on hacker news it does nothing. It's just a symbol.
> > It’s a carryover from long established internet (plaintext email, Usenet, etc.) convention, which is where reddit (and lots of other forums) got it, too.
> > > Oh wow, I didn't know that! It's always cool to learn about the history of where things we take for granted come from.
The point is, there's no need to take offense at a minor educational correction.
So is all of language. There is no reason for “cultural construct” to mean cultural construct, its just a cultural construct. But shared cultural constructs are what enables communication.
Lots of people have used it, because lots of places have copied it from where it originated.
At any rate, HN is mostly-plain-text environment that is more similar than most newer places that have adopted the convention to the context in which it originates, so in addition to its relevance to past experience, it makes sense on its own here.
> So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall, to use a convention that few people have ever used.
Yeah, lots of HN conventions each wouldn't matter if HN had one specific relevant formatting feature for the use case the convention addresses, but it doesn't, so we have the conventions we have.