(Have been sharing my thoughts on the stacker news Telegram, posting here for posterity!)

I think a deep-dive into the long-term vision is important.

Are people who are unfamiliar with markdown going to realistically contribute high-quality content and posts to a website about Bitcoin and technology? I think the vast majority of this cohort have been using Hacker News, Reddit, etc for the better part of a decade (would be a good piece of research to find out though).

I appreciate there may be a longer-term business goal to make a more general purpose website for the public that uses sats instead of upvotes. But this is a completely different design paradigm which would need to be built from the ground up. Trying to marry a specific niche forum with a broad purpose social media will just bring out the worst of both worlds I think.

Once the paradigm of WYSIWYG thinking comes in, then it is a slippery slope towards Facebookization, bringing in avatars? Then reels? This then leads to the Eternal September that has been lamented about.

I think there could be some very minor adjustments to the interface to give some better hints on markdown (Again, looking at old reddit). Simple text replies to posts are easy enough for anyone currently so there are no issues there. Nobody is being stopped from posting because of markdown.

Currently the quality of content on this site is literally a 10/10 and I am just raising the flag that any changes to core ingredients that are not fully validated and considered concerns me as it only risks making things worse!