The issue for a long time was that there is no markdown standard, so everyone had their own version of it.
CommonMark is gaining ground, so hopefully markdown will be the same everywhere soon
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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No
Yes, no, maybe.
I don’t know.
Can you repeat the question?
Nope. Most tech people don't know what markdown is.
Not Markdown as a whole, but I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold. Some also know how to ~~cross~~ the text. Not much more for a normie, though.
I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold
I wouldn't guess that at all. Pretty much everyone I know in the "normie" world would AT BEST use ctrl-i and ctrl-b if they're not just pressing the icon in the gui.
Hell, most of them look at me like I'm a goddamn morlock when I tell them to Shift-delete in order to skip the recycling bin.
Yeah, I'm a normie, I'm tech literate adjacent-adjacent, by which I mean I'm here on lemmy rather than Facebook, but no. Me and my peers are not pressing ctrl anything. I don't even know what gui means. Something user interface? I'm not proud to be this dumb, but I'm pretty sure most "regular" people are in this boat with me. I was the third most tech literate person in my entire office last year with a bunch of millennials simply because I was willing to Google things.
Most IT nowadays is just simply the ability to google. What sets a professional IT person apart from an amateur is that the professional has an educated guess as to what to google in the first place.
Non-professional: "My computer is making a weird buzzing noise"
Professional: "What are the symptoms of a bad cooling fan?"
No
Maybe?
Nah
I think less than 50% of people with access to technology are tech literate enough to know what markdown is. I don't think age really applies here so much as interest in technology.
Just because I drive a car doesn't mean I know or care about how it works. It's just a tool.
I would even say less than 5%
Lol, yeah. I'm probably being too optimistic.
You're a towel.
...could you please elaborate?
Dumb joke that's from South Park. There's a towel, and any time someone calls him a towel, he retorts with, "you're a towel".
Are you telling me you can't identify some of the common symptoms of a failing alternator!? Pshhhh...
:P
No, and they don't want to
I’m gonna go with no. I don’t think enough platforms use it natively.
Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where their basic plain-text formatting (like asterisks for bullets) will get cleaned up to a prettier format when they post it.
They may not know the name of the format or all the available features.
And quartz, of course.
Of course.
~hehe~
No.
Elder Millennial here. All I know about markdown is:
-
To make a hard copy of a thought or conversation. "Mark that down in your notes, so we don't forget."
-
A discount or sale. "Did you see the 30% markdown on three legged jeans?"
30% markdown on three legged jeans? Damn, that's almost one whole leg for free!
And yet you just used it! Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like:
- Numbering your items
- will automatically format them
- into ordered lists
- and if you use
-it's an unordered list
- same with asterisk
Markdown is 100%[^1] intuitive.
[^1]: for certain definitions of 100%.
Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like
And then other parts of it are just infuriating. Like how if you try to post song lyrics or something, the markdown just mashes every sentence together in one line for some reason. So you have to know the secret code just to make gdamn new lines. I actually pressed enter to go to a new line 5 times in this paragraph but it comes out all jumbled together after posting.
As far as I'm concerned, I shouldn't need to know some special formatting just for return to work properly.
And then you're on your phone, and typing two spaces at the end of each line is a mess because your keyboard insists you really want punctuation and a space. Because why would you end a sentence with two spaces. Gah.
Still don't have any idea what you're talking about.
You typed some text to make your first comment, and it looked something like this:
Elder Millennial here. All I know about markdown is:
1. To make a hard copy of a thought or conversation. "Mark that down in your notes, so we don't forget."
2. A discount or sale. "Did you see the 30% markdown on three legged jeans?"
The way your comment actually displays is different though, isn't it? The numbered items are indented and come one after the other without any space inbetween, and the text within each numbered item is properly aligned.
What you entered is just text, and text by itself is inherently meaningless. "Markdown" is the name of a particular standard way of formatting text so that programs can reliably interpret parts of that text as representing the writers desire for their text to be displayed a particular way. You can kind of think of it like a programming language. As another basic example, consider this text:
This is a paragraph.
This is still the same
paragraph.
Here is the second one.
And here is the third one.
I'm going to paste this text right after this sentence; notice how the amount of space doesn't matter, and how a new paragraph is denoted by at least two line breaks.
This is a paragraph. This is still the same paragraph.
Here is the second one.
And here is the third one.
I am, also, an elder millennial and confused. Maybe it's just some form of problem solving/way to sort your thoughts or options?
**NO**
No
They do not imho
My opinion
spoiler
- I don't know for sure
- My opinion doesn't matter at all
But I think, they know Markdown only, if they are involved in Reddit, Wikipedia, Obsidian/Silverbullet self-hosting or were Skype ~~victims~~ heavy-users.
don't forget Discord ~~victims~~ users
*Gen Y
Another millenial here. I've known about markdown forever, but I also LIVED online as a teenager. I suspect most people I know would think similarly to the other commenter if asked.
I know enough to get by, but the thing is the syntax isn't always the same between platforms. Sometimes I make an Empty Hyperlink just to have colorful text and people ask me "Woah how'd you do that?" and I explain it to them but I can't always show them without it auto formatting so they just never figure it out lol.
Looks like Lemmy formats empty hyperlinks as loops back here.
I fucking clicked it. I don't know what i was expecting.
Looks like Lemmy formats empty hyperlinks as loops back here.
Depends on the app, and maybe also the instance you're using?
In eternity for lemmy it shows as a link to https://www.reddit.com/if I long press it, but has an invalid link error if I try to click it.