You have to understand that you have a severely different outlook on FOSS maintainership than these projects do. You simply don't grok it. It's not like the maintainers here are unaware of the alternatives.
Is it possible to get the plaintext of comments from GitHub or the other platforms you prefer?
Re:Maintainers Don't Scale
by icebraining on Friday January 20, 2017 @07:24PM
(#13448058)
Yes, using the API you can get the raw plaintext in both Github and Gitlab, at least.
Voting is absolutely important. It makes it easier to gauge the community's reaction to issues, PRs, and comments, and cuts down on "me too" type comments which might otherwise clutter issues.
> plaintext is easier to deal with than markdown
Markdown _is_ plain text. I've been writing all my comments up to this point in Markdown. Did you notice?
> Plaintext works in a terminal and with embedded patches and inline replies and so on.
So does Markdown. The difference is that Markdown can _also_ be rendered as pretty, fully-formatted text in a web browser.