[lmm]

> It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format.

> They want to highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B, and see the text become bold.

They do not. No normal person has ever said how happy they were that they could highlight text and click a button, and certainly not that they typed Ctrl+B. Normal people do not type Ctrl+anything.

Normal people don't type text at all, but if you find the most normie internet forum you can think of - one where people talk about car parts or who the Khardasians are dating or something - you'll find it has some kind of text markup format, and the most prolific users of that forum use the markup format rather than the WYSIWTF editor that craps up their formatting too much. And if you ever find a topic with two competing norie fora, you'll find the people on the one whose text markup format is more markdown-like will be happier than the people on the one whose text markup format is less markdown-like.

[fragmede]

forum? Instagram is the mainstream product you're looking for, and the text rendering there is decidedly GUI based and not markdown-esque

[lmm]

Instagram does not offer "highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B". The normal way to put bold text on Instagram is to use an online "bold text generator" and copy-paste from there. I struggle to imagine that it's that way because people like doing that.

From a quick search only "mainstream social media" which offers native bold functionality is WhatsApp. And it uses markdown-style.