Some suggestions
Hey there! I'm pretty new to this whole website, but I figured I would chip in on suggestions I have as I go along. I will likely be editing to add more suggestions to this as I go.
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Put the "leave a comment" box at the top of the comment section, not the bottom.
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Something I noticed as I am writing this, I don't see any sort of formatting guide. While there may not be any sort of formatting yet, like italics (maybe that's italicized?) or bold, if I remember right, markdown is something besides just plain text, right? If I'm just doing a big dumb here, lemme know, haha.
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When I was automatically logged out from spending some time away, I found that when you log in, you aren't redirected back where you were attempting to go, but rather, back to the tildes homepage. It's be nice to be redirected to your original destination.
Edit: 4. When you reply to a comment in your unread page, it should be marked as read.
I like it being at the bottom. I like reading the replies and having it at the bottom encourages reading the comments. I hope they don't change it.
It would become onerous in threads with a lot of comments, though.
I think that on those threads it is very likely that whatever you wanted to say as a top level comment has already been said so keeping the comment box at the bottom will help preventing duplicate top level comments. In big threads you are more likely going to reply to one of the already posted top level replies.
Anyway if you still feel you need to make a top level comment you can press the End button of your keyboard to jump to the bottom of the page where the comment box is.
Well that's a feature of modern browsers I really should have known about
I think many people will have trouble adjusting to the site after Reddit. One problem the comment box at the top will cause is people repeating the same comments over and over and over again. Perhaps a bottom-nested comment box will be bad for long, 1000+ comment threads with endless scrolling enabled, but I think we have a ways to go before worrying about that.
One thing that I dislike is how every post starts its title RIGHT on the edge of my screen. If I had even an inch of margin to start with (like Reddit thumbnails), I'd feel a lot better reading things. There are some user-end work-arounds, sure, but you know how that goes.
One thing that's interesting that I'm not sure I like yet is how there's only Voting -- no ups or downs, just votes. Interesting stuff.
Do you mean on the listing pages, or when you're inside a comment page like this one? Are you on mobile or desktop?
If you haven't seen it yet, I've written a bit about why there's no downvoting. The comment tag system isn't fleshed out at all yet, but eventually it should effectively take that role, and do it better.
I'm not that user, but I know on mobile for me it's hard to know which comment belongs to what parent comment, but it's not THAT hard. I honestly wouldn't change it, you'd have to sacrifice a lot of screen space. The UI in threads has been otherwise great (different colors denoting new comments is wonderful.)
I answered the questions but the cancel button confused me and I lost it. I pressed TAB TAB SPACE (I'm used to TAB SPACE, so I thought I was being careful).
>_< Rough.
Anyway, main link page, on desktop, wow you plan to have mobile support, great, hope it works.
For markdown help, this site has helped me a lot. I don't know for sure if everything there is right, but the basic stuff (italics, bold, links, etc.) should be correct.
I agree with the other two suggestions.
Everything there is right, except:
If Tildes does add markdown, I hope they don't do it the same as Reddit. All too often I see people unable to make a line break or accidentally starting a new list on Reddit. The only markdown that's really needed in my opinion is bold, italics, superscript, and strikethrough. Anything else is unnecessary and only causes formatting issues.
Perhaps, instead of stripping useful features to gain simplicity, it would be better to have a "simpler" edit box?
Would this happen if they got to use a TinyMCE-like editor, instead of markdown's ASCII formatting codes? I'd rather see the problem rectified by improving ease-of-use, rather than ditching less-commonly used (yet still useful) features.
I think this would be a much better idea! It would solve the problem of people accidentally using markdown when they don't mean to, but still have features available if needed.
I am already using markdown, but it's CommonMark, which tries to fix some of the common issues/annoyances with markdown.
For example, the line-break behavior is fixed, and I've also specifically tried to make it harder for people to accidentally start a new list (though you can see in this post's OP that there are still other issues that can happen).
What about monospace blocks? Nobody wants to read code set out in a sans-serif font, nor a block of code that's not indented because the default browser behavior is to collapse extra white space.
So please;
import {markdown} from 'markdown';