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    With this switch, we get: A consistent user experience that aligns with what users know from other websites, predictable formatting, reduced maintenance burden on our software engineers, reduced risk when changing markdown formatting in the future, a stable foundation to build future feature enhancements around formatting and editing. There's value to our end users and there's a lot to win for our engineering teams in the form of massively reduced tech debt. Commented Jun 4, 2020 at 6:31
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    I upvoted because the question was the same one I had in my head but was too afraid to ask for not wanting to appear foolish or incredibly naive. It led to a good comment, too. A comment that was easier to wrap my non-nerd head around. Commented Jun 4, 2020 at 7:56
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    @HamVocke Thank you for that comment. Commented Jun 4, 2020 at 15:04
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    @ham In other words: There is no value for end users whatsoever. Indeed, you are investing effort in making sure that there is no observable change at all. You can expect your readers to be developers, that are perfectly capable of understanding, that a change sometimes doesn't deliver any value, but rather enables future change that can ultimately deliver value. This is not the change that does, so there's not need to sell it as such. Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 7:40
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    @Tim Switching to a common standard most certainly does have value for end users, in that they do not have to learn so many similar but confusingly incompatible formatting rules for every site on the internet that uses Markdown. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 10:55
  • @emi There's no value in one site switching to CommonMark. If everyone did, you might have a point, but even then, the switch needs to be as invisible as possible to be successful. There is no value for users in a change that's not observable (modulo some corner cases). Contrast that with Stack Exchange switching to, say, GitHub Flavored Markdown. Now that would deliver actual value. I mean, we've been asking for tables for almost as long as Stack Overflow existed. GFM has a formal specification, too. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 12:44
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    @Tim Since GFM is in fact an extension of CommonMark, you just proved my point. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 13:39
  • @emi I'm not sure which point you were trying to prove. If I have supported that, consider it an accident. Exchanging one Markdown renderer for another functionally equivalent Markdown renderer doesn't deliver value to its users. It's a change that's purely internal to the site, and - if all goes well - without any observable change. The fact that this enables delivering value at a later point in time doesn't magically turn this change into one that does. If you weren't made aware of this change, you wouldn't have noticed a thing. Does "no change" feel like "added value" to you? Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 16:38
  • @Tim ????? Where did you get the idea that that it’s “without any observable change”? The details of the syntax needed to write answers changed; that’s most certainly an observable change, and if I were not made aware of it, I would probably find out soon the hard way, and become confused. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 16:56
  • @emi It's written all over the post, e.g.: "For the vast majority of your writing, you won’t see a difference at all." The changes you might observe are corner cases. In those rare cases, the switch to CommonMark is a bug fix. No matter how much you want this to be different, it really is just this mundane: The switch is an implementation detail, that doesn't itself deliver any value to users. Yet I concede that I was wrong about one thing: You cannot expect your readers to be developers after all. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 17:52
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    Switching to a common and formalized standard (from a custom and probably proprietary mishmash of rules) will likely help long-term preservation of our content. Commented Jun 14, 2020 at 9:08