I think less than 50% of people with access to technology are tech literate enough to know what markdown is. I don't think age really applies here so much as interest in technology.
Just because I drive a car doesn't mean I know or care about how it works. It's just a tool.
Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where their basic plain-text formatting (like asterisks for bullets) will get cleaned up to a prettier format when they post it.
They may not know the name of the format or all the available features.
Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like
And then other parts of it are just infuriating.
Like how if you try to post song lyrics or something,
the markdown just mashes every sentence together in one line for some reason.
So you have to know the secret code just to make gdamn new lines.
I actually pressed enter to go to a new line 5 times in this paragraph but it comes out all jumbled together after posting.
As far as I'm concerned, I shouldn't need to know some special formatting just for return to work properly.
Any Elder Millennial born after 1979 can’t Markdown, all they know is jot that down, 30% off on jeans, nostalgia for blockbuster, eat hot chip and buy avocado toast
Not Markdown as a whole, but I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold. Some also know how to cross the text. Not much more for a normie, though.
I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold
I wouldn't guess that at all. Pretty much everyone I know in the "normie" world would AT BEST use ctrl-i and ctrl-b if they're not just pressing the icon in the gui.
Hell, most of them look at me like I'm a goddamn morlock when I tell them to Shift-delete in order to skip the recycling bin.
Yeah, I'm a normie, I'm tech literate adjacent-adjacent, by which I mean I'm here on lemmy rather than Facebook, but no. Me and my peers are not pressing ctrl anything. I don't even know what gui means. Something user interface? I'm not proud to be this dumb, but I'm pretty sure most "regular" people are in this boat with me. I was the third most tech literate person in my entire office last year with a bunch of millennials simply because I was willing to Google things.
and if you want to experiment in private, there are lots of live editors; locally I recommend Obsidian. If you don't want to install anything, there are also in-browser options such as:
Another millenial here. I've known about markdown forever, but I also LIVED online as a teenager. I suspect most people I know would think similarly to the other commenter if asked.