I feel that you are talking about an issue that is MUCH BIGGER than HN story replies. Society, as a whole has become much ruder. I attribute it to the passive-aggressive frenzy that is Social Media. All of a sudden you can call someone ANYTHING YOU WANT without fear of direct (and many times indirect) retribution. This phenomenon has saturated our daily interactions. Now, instead of a courteous phone call requesting my presence, my boss chats me "come here". What?!?! Am I a bad-dog?
C'mon people ... remember your manners!
Italics and other text modifiers are essential for clear communication using only text. However, as a new user myself I was frustrated by a lack of documentation for comment markup. As far as I can tell, the only text modifier for HN comments is italics which are specified by surrounding a word with asterisks.
I wish there where more text modifiers (like bold and underline), as well as some kind of documentation for them.
