I understand the herd effect - so I put it in user-facing projects that I'm working on - but I don't understand what's driving the herd. Specifically, I don't see any advantages over asciidoc and find it awful to work with.
edit: I do understand this project, though. It'll get rid of the horribleness in implementing markdown, at least.
Reddit uses Markdown. GitHub uses Markdown. HN (sorta) uses Markdown. Wordpress, Tumblr, and Discourse all use Markdown. If I used Markdown for my own User-Generated-Content Textareas™, people might already know it.
If I use Asciidoc, I may as well be using SGML. It's just another (nice!) syntax you're forcing people to cram into their brains.
I'd never heard of asciidoc before this thread. I suspect asciidoc suffered from being associated with docbook? And perhaps it's just that Perl was much more popular for writing forums in than Python, at the time.
edit: I do understand this project, though. It'll get rid of the horribleness in implementing markdown, at least.