Continuing to use code formatting after being made aware of the problem wouldn't be civil disobedience either. It would merely inconvenience the large number of people who read HN on mobile devices, for no purpose.
(Edited to remove a somewhat unrelated philosophical note.)
We all do it from time to time, even you did it few days ago [1], monospace have its purpose, maybe HN should simply fix it.
So yes, given HN's meager formatting options, monospaceisgood for that! :-)
You may note that later in that same comment there is a longer quote that I formatted in non-code italics.
But hey, if I encouraged you to create an HN account, that's great! Speaking as someone who writes code in a proportional font, we may have some interesting discussions ahead of us. ;-)
Because once upon a time the “H” in “HN” meant something.
Italics works fine for quote IMO.
Italics works fine for quote IMO
____
I propose using four underscores as a delimiter of a quote block, like asciidoctor, in addition to italics. I think it looks better than the markdown way of using ">" in front of a quote as it can get quite cumbersome and ugly when you're quoting multiple lines of something. However, I generally enjoy using markdown more if it works on a website. It just looks ugly IMO if it doesn't.
I think you'll find the practice of prefixing quoted lines with ">" originated with old Unix email and Usenet.
Until such time that the site supports quoted text a little civil disobedience is warranted. It's not like it's a hard problem.