[comex]

We know what it means, but it’s still hard to distinguish at a glance what is quoted and what is not. It works in (plaintext) email because emails are traditionally word-wrapped and “>” is inserted at the start of each line – not once at the start of an arbitrarily long paragraph. And even then, email clients often color quoted blocks to further visually distinguish them.

[hombre_fatal]

Never had an issue with it on HN. 99% of quotes occur at the start of the post and the rest of the post is a reply.

Posts that interleave their content with quoted bits are rarely as constructive as they think (almost always just point-by-point bickering) that I find impossible to follow no matter what formatting they could've used for the quotes.

Also a single ">" prefix on a long wrapped line is a bit of internet convention with younger crowds probably thanks to 4chan. I doubt most people using it these days even remember seeing it in emails.

If anything, HN should post-process lines that start with ">" to indent them.