Ask HN: Why HN doesn't allow markdown? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why HN doesn't allow markdown?

7 points666_howitzer9 comments

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Among other things, HN was a test case for programming in Arc, and mostly by one programmer: pg.

So the likely reason that HN does not allow Markdown is because there is/was no Arc implementation of Markdown.

It is not that there is no markdown / formatting allowed. It just is, that it is so very very limited:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Esp. the "no links in the text-field, but in the comments"

It is successful :-)

pg knows

It would be easy to implement some more primitives (and make them translate into HTML)

It MUST be intensional

That logic doesn't quite work in this case. As of 131 day ago, pg was the main programmer on HN. So, while implementing Markdown is easy, it is also the case that:

(1) He had very little time

(2) Markdown was just one potentially easy feature among many other potentially easy feature.

(3) As he stated many times, his focus was on reducing the amount of harmful comments.

What extra formatting would you want? And why? To some extent, fancy formatting only detracts from carefully reasoned arguments. Why clutter the page with more layout?

What would you use, and why?

I'm not certain but I think its because HN wishes to promote positive up voting not down vote trolling like reddit etc... If its good It will get up voted, if not then just don't upvote it.

I think the question is about "Markdown," the formatting language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

ah, sorry I read that wrong. I lose internet points dont I? :/

The point of markdown is that it's supposed to be perfectly readable in "unrendered" form, so in a sense you can already use markdown in any plaintext context.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because they want people to focus on the content of comments, and not their formatting.

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