I agree that’s a good feature too (and it’s something we’re planning on getting to sooner or later. FYI we just added footnotes to the markdown editor, although they’re trickier to implement UI-wise in the rich editor)
One major thing the team had talked about for “why Q&A” though is generating more, and clearer, demand for content. I touched on this in another comment:
Right now on LW you might be vaguely interested in writing posts to contribute, but it’s not clear what topics people are interested in. If you have a clear idea of a blogpost to write you certainly can do that, but the generator for such posts are “what things are you already thinking about?”
By contrast, the Q&A system gives you clear visibility into “what topics do people actually want to know more about?” and the value is not just that you can answer specific questions, but that you can learn about topics as you do so that can lead to more generation of content. This seems potentially valuable to hedge against future years where “the people with lots of good ideas are mostly doing things other than write blogposts” (such as what happened in 2016 or so). I’m hoping the Q&A system makes the LW community more robust.
I agree that’s a good feature too (and it’s something we’re planning on getting to sooner or later. FYI we just added footnotes to the markdown editor, although they’re trickier to implement UI-wise in the rich editor)
One major thing the team had talked about for “why Q&A” though is generating more, and clearer, demand for content. I touched on this in another comment:
Is this documented anywhere? What is the syntax, etc.?
Syntax is based on the markdown-it footnotes plugin: https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it-footnote
I will add it to my to-do list to generally update our editor guides, and make them more discoverable. Currently not documented anywhere.