[Insanity]

cache links sounds like an okay idea.

OTOH, the avatars sounds like a horrible idea to me.

I'm neutral on the markdown one, it wouldn't be too bad but it might end up making comments look like mini-articles rather than just comments.

[Bartweiss]

I'm opposed to markdown for that reason. It's a bit of a shame that the existing formatting isn't aligned to markdown syntax, and I think lots of people don't know the

  code trick.

But otherwise, I'm grateful to not have posts using headers, multipart essays with horizontal rules, or that "every word a hyperlink" style that people use when they want to intensify a statement by implying it's densely sourced or describing a common issue. The informal standards HN has worked out seem sufficient for the conversations I value most here:

- this is sufficient for bullets

- since people don't bullet whole paragraphs

1. this works for numbers

2. for the same reason

> And this is just fine for pseudo-blockquotes, which can be much longer.

And the lack of embedded links encourages human-readable URLs that are either sources[1], or inline links to a page people might want to visit after reading the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

It's a bit arbitrary what's supported, but HN has always felt to me like a display of how working within constraints can improve quality.

[usrusr]

> but HN has always felt to me like a display of how working within constraints can improve quality.

Definitely in the same boat. When I started reading through this rare opportunity for legitimate meta discussion I was about to advertise the missing vote direction indication on the unvote button. Because it's so easy to hit the wrong direction on mobile and that would be an elegant way to fix it.

But now I think that even this might be more feature than bug: knowing that there is a chance that it might have been just clumsy upvoters makes it easier to do the right thing when getting downvoted.

[lilactown]

I think that just having a proper code block, that worked on mobile, would help a lot.

[Bartweiss]

Bringing over the markup for monospacing would actually be really nice, yeah. It is irritating that code can't be inlined and requires an unusual input like leading spaces to mark out.