"People" don't do it; HN does it. Indented lines in a post are always monospaced, on the assumption, I suppose, that they're likely to be code examples. There's no way to turn this off AFAIK.

And no, HN does not use Markdown.

I know the formatting system. My question is why the users are formatting their text (e.g. with 4 places leading each line) *suc that HN renders it as monospace, which then forces a sideways scroll on mobile and small screens. That seems to make it harder to read for some with no corresponding upside.

Oh. Well, I think they just don't realize that HN will monospace it.

I agree with you, it's annoying.

They don't realize it even after seeing their post go live? And seeing what other people's monotype quotes look like?

I never like to assume malice, but ...

The people indent the text (or fail to remove the leading white space when copying).

It isn't a huge time sink to wrap a paragraph in stars.

I think mostly people forget that > works and that therefore you can do

> quotes like this

since it's markdown - often you get commentish things that allow limited HTML plus indented code blocks, and people get used to using the latter as the only thing that works everywhere

'>' doesn't "work"; it doesn't do anything on HN. It's just a convention that readers recognize as indicating quotation.

HN does not use Markdown.

At least ">" doesn't break anything.

    Pre is broken on mobile, forcing users to scroll a horizontal line which is incredibly annoying if it's a long line.

Here's a screen shot: http://imgur.com/Ru56wMK

And pre with very long unbroken lines is even worse.

I wasn't expressing a value judgment, just trying to explain how HN works.

I agree with you that it's annoying when people post long indented lines.

it can be touch-scrolled here, there just aren't scroll bars. Took me a while to find, but maybe your browser is buggy, eve.

I noticed people were doing this and wrote a userscript a while ago to make it work. I kind of wish HN supported it.

https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/7a21c0187fedd6f47e7c

I wrote in a while ago to ask that it be officially supported, but apparently that would break something that HN's spam filter relies on.

Looks good in desktop browsers.

not really: http://i.imgur.com/uxqERat.png (you have to be very careful about what indentation level you're at, how long your lines are, etc, etc, things that people just don't do most of the time)

It's also customary when quoting large sections of text. I'm not sure if this carried over from email, or from academic texts (where if your quote is more than a line or two, it needs to be formatted differently).

I think mostly people forget that > works and that therefore you can do

> q