People struggle to format quoted replies across text platforms
Plain-text email users find manually fixing wrapped, indented quotes tedious, while Telegram and Hacker News users describe friction with the way quoted text or line breaks are entered. The details vary by platform, so a single useful tool would need simple destination-specific formatting rather than a universal format. A Bluesky request for typed or handwritten-style replies is adjacent, but less clearly about text formatting.
For people who quote and reply to text online. Mentioned from Apr 2024 to Jun 2025 on Bluesky, GitHub and Hacker News.
4 different people described this problem in 4 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 2.0/10
- Pain
- 4.5/10
- Frequency
- 5.8/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Consumers
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Low
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
Leaving it like that annoys me, while fixing it by hand gets tedious very fast
Highlighting text to be affected by the hotkey and the context menu both take more time and effort than necessary, while typing Telegram's variant of markdown becomes very convenient with practice
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 1 product idea with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 4 places to find your first customers
- 2 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks