If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Data hoarding vs selective saving

  • Some argue compulsively saving web content is wasted effort and cognitive overhead; others say future searchability and option value make local copies invaluable.
  • One camp trusts that “the internet never forgets” and prefers to let others bear storage costs; another reports an accelerating loss of semi‑obscure documents, especially government/organizational material.
  • Older participants note that decades of archives were rarely revisited more than a few years back, suggesting diminishing returns; others counter that AI may make large personal archives newly useful.

Web archiving & the Internet Archive

  • Several people rely on tools like SingleFile, Markdownload, or linkding to save full pages (HTML/webarchive/MHTML) rather than Markdown, especially for complex layouts, paywalled or app‑like sites.
  • There’s appreciation but concern for the fragility and legal risks of the Internet Archive; some want multiple IA‑like projects or partial mirrors, even with degraded media quality.
  • A recurring point: the ability to find and organize archives (full‑text search, tagging, annotations, vector search) matters more than the raw act of saving.

Why Markdown, and how people use it

  • Many keep nearly everything textual in Markdown: notes, blog drafts, research, meeting minutes, even daily journals, often synced via Git, Nextcloud, or cloud drives.
  • Advantages cited: plain text, tool portability, easy scripting (Pandoc, Python, Quarto), and the ability to rebuild new systems over the same files.
  • Some are building personal “knowledge bases” or LLM corpora from scraped Markdown (bookmarks, GitHub stars, HN posts, transcripts).

Limitations, fragmentation, and readers

  • Pain points: images and tables, math, diagrams, underlining, colored text, custom blocks, rich layout, and lack of standardized frontmatter.
  • People debate CommonMark’s design (emphasis syntax, ambiguity, complexity of parsers) and the profusion of flavors (GitHub, Obsidian, MDX).
  • A strong subthread complains about the scarcity of simple Markdown viewers (vs editors with preview) compared to ubiquitous PDF readers.

Alternatives and ecosystems

  • Org‑mode is praised as a more holistic PKM system (tasks, time management, literate programming) but is seen as Emacs‑centric.
  • Others advocate AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, MediaWiki markup, Typst, HTML, or even RTF for richer, WYSIWYG‑friendly, or more semantically precise documents.
  • Consensus: use Markdown for most plain text; switch to richer formats when layout, semantics, or exact styling are essential.