[diggan]

> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption

That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself.

Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.

[bsimpson]

Don't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-non-technical people to learn Markdown.

[presbyterian]

And Discord as well. Every young person is on Discord, they're all learning some Markdown

[ummonk]

Teams and Slack as well, though they use an odd variant markdown (where single asterisk indicates bold instead of italics).

[chrismorgan]

What things like Slack and WhatsApp use are not variants of Markdown, but entirely unrelated lightweight markup languages <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>.

As for Teams, it looks like it’s much closer to Markdown (uses the same idiosyncratic/stupid link syntax), but still significantly incompatible even if they call it that. And my guess (as a non-user) is that it’s just an input method immediately converted to HTML or similar, not retained as text. So in that way it’s not Markdown either.

[doublepg23]

My least favorite Teams markdown idiosyncrasy is using (foobar) for emoji search instead of :foobar:

[ummonk]

Technically speaking, Slack's markup language is mrkdwn.

[chrismorgan]

That’s not technically, that’s marketingly (sure, it was presumably developers that named it, but it’s still marketing). mrkdwn is a horribly misleading name and they should feel guilty. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+mrkdwn&type=commen...

[bsimpson]

I get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic Markdown).

[cheema33]

Teams does not use Markdown AFAIK. I wish it did.

[ummonk]

See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-markdown-form...

My company is on Teams and I regularly use Markdown in my messages, though I still struggle to remember that I have to use underscores not asterisks for italics.

[OJFord]

It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Reddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the formatting the new version supports, so things like code blocks are often broken.

[chrismorgan]

Original Markdown didn’t have fenced code blocks either.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Yes, Old Reddit Markdown is much closer to original Markdown than to CommonMark. New Reddit Markdown is closer to CommonMark.

[minimaxir]

> Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs

It helps that Jekyll, one such static blog, was also pushed by GitHub back in the day.

[lblume]

Was Jekyll ever that popular though?

[nirvdrum]

I can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.

[johannes1234321]

It certainly populated the "Mark Town to static HTML" blogging approach and created the room for its successors.