I agree with this. Reddit and Discord both use markdown and I've been using it for ages without ever knowing it's called Markdown.

I just thought it's a neat trick you can apply italics by underscore and make text stand out with back ticks around.

Even least technical people using bold/italics/indent on WhatsApp are using markdown in a way.

The bold/italics/indent syntax predates markdown. Markdown is great but the “*” / “_” / “>” were all in use before it (see Usenet emails for example)

Well, that’s why Markdown was popular. It took existing conventions, codified them, and more importantly, crested a tool to convert them to HTML.

At its core, Markdown was little more than a perl script that converted a human readable doc written using many online conventions into HTML.

Others realized this was a brilliant idea and created their own supersets and/or alternatives of markdown. That’s why there’s so many flavors of markdown with little tweaks.

And that’s why Markdown is popular. Because it took advantage of convention built out of years of trial and error.

The same is largely true of asciidoc. There are cases where you do kind of need to understand asciidoc, but mostly for features where in markdown you have to reach for the escape hatch of inline html.