Comment by slantyyz

> Doing this basic formatting in ascii text is just mind-numbingly stupid.

It might be today, but many of us who are older used Markdown-like formatting even before Markdown was even a thing, because on BBSes and other applications, everything in those days was plain text.

I don't know Gruber's intentions when he created Markdown, but my guess is he created it for himself first, and then other people adopted it because they think similarly.