HN has this dogma where they won't add any more markup even if it's reasonable. I guess they don't want every comment turning into a fancy formatted mess with

HN has this dogma where they won't add any more markup even if it's reasonable. I guess they don't want every comment turning into a fancy formatted mess with different font sizes and lists, but blockquotes are a necessity. > is used a lot, and it always looks bad, particularly for multi-line quotes. HN won't add proper blockquote rendering for ">", so people try to mimic it, badly, using indented <pre>/unflowed text (which HN bizarrely implemented even though they didn't implement indented flowed text). Don't blame people, blame HN.