I see this pattern daily on HN: one user posts a comment which includes a quote indented by spaces. The text in the quote shows up with no word wrap, because that kind of indentation indicates a verbatim block, which is intended for things like code. The quote thus becomes incredibly hard to read, especially on mobile, and other users reply to complain.

This mistake happens frequently enough that I think we have to accept that it’s a UX problem with HN itself. Let’s come up with some ideas for solving it.

Some possibilities to get the ball rolling:

- HN could explain the markup format on the page you use to submit a comment. This seems like the most minimal change that might help.

- HN could begin to treat multispace indent (and perhaps “> “ as well) as quotes, provide some nice formatting for them, and choose another way of marking up verbatim text that’s harder to stumble on accidentally. (Markdown’s “`” and “```” work well, in my experience.) This is my preferred solution.

- HN could provide a small link next to verbatim blocks that would allow you to toggle on or off word wrap for them. Ideally this would default to “word wrap on” automatically if HN detects that the text contains really long lines.

What do you think?