It’s not hard. It’s actually impossible. I agree, just use >.

If I worked for YC as a HN mod I would literally spend a bit of time every day to review as many mono space-using comments I could every day and edit them to use > instead.

Or give us actual syntax for blockquotes? (> at the beginning of a line, markdown style, would be great…) Which I feel like gets used all the time in the discourse here, and for good reasons, too.

Then you would have that bit of time back, and the rest of us could stop scrolling back and forth when someone code-blocks a blockquote.

Or write a bot to do it automatically everywhere

Or fix the CSS

The monospace is, I think, intended for code, and a lot of us use it that way.

You want something separate for code blocks and block quotes here.

Why not use italics instead? How does the ">" help? You can put it at the beginning of the paragraph, but lines get re-flowed so you can't put it at the beginning of lines.

The > was the original (?) convention for email.

But seriously HN should just allow basic quotes. And, while they are at it, increase the size of voting arrows to make it possible to reliably hit them on mobile. I get it’s somewhat nice to have a site that does not constantly redesign everything, but pretending you lost the password for the server is just overdoing it in the opposite direction.

> increase the size of voting arrows to make it possible to reliably hit them on mobile

I was left satisfied when they added the unvote/undown buttons. I only miss on my first try about 10% of the time :)

It took me two attempts to upvote this comment. :)

At least I didn't accidentally Flag something today.

Not just small screens. The right part is cut off on my 17" screen.