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Ask HN: Should HN support Markdown comments?

2 points by nchammas ↗ HN
Of course, you can type your comments in Markdown today; they just won't be rendered as such. :)

Anyway, the audience here would probably make good use of such a feature, and comments would benefit from all the nice formatting options that people are already familiar with from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and other places on the web.

I'm not sure how HN would transition to support Markdown rendering of comments. Perhaps some problem with the transition is the only reason this hasn't been done already.

In any case, wouldn't this be a solid feature add for the site?

5 comments

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tlb
Supporting every feature of markdown would enable people to insert eye-catching but distracting comments. Besides the features already described at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc, which ones would be most useful without being abusable?
nchammas
The feature I miss most is being able to link text.

Right now people just paste links as-is, or use this numbering syntax [0] which works but could definitely be replaced with something better.

After that, supporting lists and fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting would be handy, though those are probably more prone to abuse.

[0] Where the link goes here.

karmakaze
What's already supported is a subset of Markdown. Certainly not whole hog. Perhaps I'd like to see backtick `code` quotes or linebreaks without paragraphs (though I don't like MD's use of invisible trailing space as markup).
sidcool
First, HN should support collapsible comments. I would love to see that feature.