Nostr Web Client

I have tried to get normal people to use Markdown things multiple times in the past. They have no idea of what that is.

I am 100% of the opinion that "normies" can learn anything and that we shouldn't refrain from pushing "technical" things into them when that's important, but part of the Markdown sales pitch I see sometimes is assuming that Markdown knowledge and love is widespread, when that is so absurdly false it's ludicrous.

RedTailHawk 10mo ago

Not all devs are like this, but many devs grew up experiencing negative social situations which led them to spend time with computers rather than with people.

If this pattern persists, devs often grow to be extremely out of touch with normies, leading to the exact issue you pointed out with respect to “Markdown”, whatever that is.

The answer is for devs to test group their stuff using normies. When a dev watches just how little normies know the dev is more likely to realize that their work doesn’t end at coding. It ends when a bridge has been built that normies can walk on.

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Discussion

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 10mo ago

the Steem blockchain forum, circa 2016 introduced a standard markdown formatting (it's ok, but links are confusing syntax) and thousands of people were gleefully learning how to do it

but as a simple plaintext-that-can-become-richtext it's not the best, and it's notable that github is now supporting asciidoc, which will be unfamiliar, but has a lot more simple and important things (like admonitions, for example, eg NOTE and WARNING and its got a built in table of contents generator, in comparison, there is a dozen different "flavors" of markdown and more or less only github-flavored is widely known and understood

since it's mostly for writing longer form articles anyway, and there are rich text editor widgets available, the problem for normies doesn't really exist

not rendering normal kind 1/1111 notes as markdown is stupid because they are the same unless you put in the # header prefixes and the *emphasis* and **bold** etc and people already do a lot of these anyway, they have become common idiom

but for whatever reason, nostr client developers have declined to parse all notes as markdown, and as such we can't have nice links or sections in somewhat longer texts, no bold, italic, no plaintext or quoting (very helpful for technical discussions)