Markdown Ate the World

> Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created.

I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's important to remember that in 2004 when Markdown came out it was just one of dozens of lightweight markup languages competing for mindshare on forums and other websites with commenting systems in the late 2000s. Markdown was adopted by popular sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and GitHub which helped it win.

Over a decade before Markdown there was setext on Usenet and plain-text email, both of which influenced Markdown. In a sense Markdown represents the continuing influence of plain-text email on our communication even as most emails sent today are HTML.