It let the user focus on what they were writing, and not what they were trying to make thing look like as they write.
Markdown, hmm, What is that? Markdown is a simplified text-to-HTML conversion that, make web content writing easier for web writers and focuses to make content writing easier and fun.
Over time it had almost become a rule that ever blogger or writer needed a good knowledge of HTML, so he/she could write web content, but writing HTML all the time did not seem right, when it was commenting or writing a blog post or other types of web content, for some non-developers it was a painstaking process. The only alternative to avoid writing HTML in a <code class="highlighter-rouge">textarea or input was to use web editors like WYSIWYG that gave interactive interface or nicely styled buttons or icons to turn any plain text into HTML elements like bold, italic, ~deleted text~, quote or <code class="highlighter-rouge">code, these were the most commonly used HTML elements used for commenting or writing web content, and had turned into a common feature in CMS(Content Management System) like WordPress, it really did not make the task any better, while many editors similar to WYSIWYG existed, but they did not make situations any better for non-developers or non-programmers, who just writers to place his/her opinion, it had also become a fact that writes with better HTML knowledge were better writers because of the way they could control the appearance of it,after all of this hassle to writer, Markdown started to become a reality and turned thing around, it was a better way to write web content.
What made a lot of users switch to Markdown was the fact that it was not yet another markup language, which did no end up making people learn a new language, and make browsers support a new language. Markdown was an innovative way to write in plain text that would later be parsed into HTML, which made a big change in the way web content was written, It allowed anyone to write better web content and it was easier for one to understand how it worked, it started to become a common feature shipped into static site generators, over time it gained popularity, due to the way it worked, later it even became a big feature in blogging platforms, and newer blogging platforms started to arrive with features like Markdown preview support like Ghost, which made it, even more, easier to blog and write Markdown. Currently other CMS like Anchor CMS, Grav CMS (Admin Plugin) and WordPress(Jetpack plugin enabled) started supporting Markdown.
The only problem with Markdown is, it does not have any standardisation, so developers come up with their own flavour(version) of it, which would make people have different styles of writing in Markdown and while switching to a different Markdown parser it might end up not being very comfortable by the way it would be parsed. The most preferred version of Markdown is GitHub’s Flavoured Markdown which is used by GitHub and a large number of static site generators, this can be fixed, when choosing a Markdown driven system and trying to see if it supports the version of Markdown you use. Many publishing services give Markdown as an option to give better writing experience to their users, like Tumblr, it is also used in writing documentation like README for open source projects.
I switch to Markdown, while searching for an alternative to WordPress and searching a better tool or way to manage posts, I ended up using Octopress which is a static blogging framework for my older website, but that made me discover Markdown, which seems to be the greatest switch, I have ever made as a writer, I continue to use Markdown as I write this post in Ghost.
