Don't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-non-technical people to learn Markdown.
And Discord as well. Every young person is on Discord, they're all learning some Markdown
Teams and Slack as well, though they use an odd variant markdown (where single asterisk indicates bold instead of italics).
What things like Slack and WhatsApp use are not variants of Markdown, but entirely unrelated lightweight markup languages <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>.
As for Teams, it looks like it’s much closer to Markdown (uses the same idiosyncratic/stupid link syntax), but still significantly incompatible even if they call it that. And my guess (as a non-user) is that it’s just an input method immediately converted to HTML or similar, not retained as text. So in that way it’s not Markdown either.
My least favorite Teams markdown idiosyncrasy is using (foobar) for emoji search instead of :foobar:
Technically speaking, Slack's markup language is mrkdwn.
That’s not technically, that’s marketingly (sure, it was presumably developers that named it, but it’s still marketing). mrkdwn is a horribly misleading name and they should feel guilty. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+mrkdwn&type=commen...
I get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic Markdown).
Teams does not use Markdown AFAIK. I wish it did.
See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-markdown-form...
My company is on Teams and I regularly use Markdown in my messages, though I still struggle to remember that I have to use underscores not asterisks for italics.
It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
Reddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the formatting the new version supports, so things like code blocks are often broken.
Original Markdown didn’t have fenced code blocks either.
Yes, Old Reddit Markdown is much closer to original Markdown than to CommonMark. New Reddit Markdown is closer to CommonMark.