No worries, it's an easy mistake to make. The formatting options on HN are pretty meager: two leading spaces (not four like Markdown) for block code, asterisks

No worries, it's an easy mistake to make. The formatting options on HN are pretty meager: two leading spaces (not four like Markdown) for block code, asterisks for emphasis. So it's natural that people try to make do with what's available. I don't mind, I get a lot of upvotes for posting those mobile friendly quotes. Just call me the Quote Fixer Bot. ;-) Markdown recognizes the > quote convention and puts the text in a <blockquote> so it can be styled, typically indented a bit with a vertical bar on the left. I wish HN did that too! A convention that is often used for quotes here is to both use the > and italicize them, like this: > *You can quote me on this.* which renders as: > You can quote me on this. This is especially useful when you are interspersing quotes with your own text, as grzm did above. I can't make up my mind which I like better for longer multi-paragraph quotes: the italics make it look more like a quote, but I find long stretches of italic text harder to read.