Reddit italics and bold follow standard Markdown, and Reddit accepts both spellings of each. Wrap text in one asterisk or one underscore for italic, two for bold, and three for bold italic. *italic* and _italic_ produce the same result, so pick whichever is easier to type around the words you are emphasising.

Underscores are the safer choice when your text already contains asterisks, and asterisks are the safer choice inside file paths or variable names, because Reddit does not treat an underscore in the middle of a word as emphasis — snake_case_name stays intact. There is no underline: Reddit reserves that styling for links, and __text__, which means underline in some other apps, means bold here.

Reddit strikethrough uses two tildes on each side of the text. It works in comments, in text posts and inside lists and quotes, and it is the conventional way to show that you changed your mind mid-thread without deleting what you originally wrote — which everyone reading the replies underneath you will thank you for.

The Reddit spoiler tag is >!like this!<: an angle bracket and an exclamation mark before the text, then the same pair reversed after it. Reddit blacks the text out and reveals it when a reader clicks or taps. It works in comments and in the body of a text post, and it can cover a single word or a whole paragraph.

Spoilers do not nest. Putting one spoiler inside another gives you a single spoiler that ends at the first closing marker, so cover the whole passage once rather than trying to layer it. Marking a whole post as a spoiler is a different feature: that is a flag you set on the post itself, which blurs its thumbnail and labels it in the feed. The inline syntax below only hides the text you wrap.

Reddit superscript is a caret. ^word raises everything up to the next space, which is why footnote-style asides on Reddit tend to be one long run-on word. For more than one word, wrap the text in parentheses: ^(several words at once). This is Reddit-specific and is not part of standard Markdown, so it will not carry over if you paste the same text into GitHub or a note-taking app.

Carets stack. ^^tiny raises the text twice and makes it smaller still, which is the usual way people write the quiet aside under a joke. There is no subscript on Reddit: no caret-equivalent exists for it, and the tilde syntax some other Markdown flavours use for subscript is strikethrough here.

A Reddit hyperlink is a standard Markdown link: [visible text](https://example.com). A bare URL is linked automatically, so you only need the bracket form when you want the link to read as words rather than as an address. Reddit also linkifies subreddit and user references written as r/subreddit and u/username, which is the tidiest way to point at another community mid-sentence.

Depending on the subreddit and where the reader came from, Reddit may show a link-safety interstitial before sending someone to an external site, and some subreddits restrict outbound links through their own automod rules. Neither is anything your Markdown can control, so it is worth naming the destination in the link text rather than hiding it behind "click here".

A Reddit quote is a line that starts with > followed by a space. Every line you want inside the quote needs its own marker, and adding a second marker — >> — nests one quote inside another, which is how a chain of replies gets quoted back through several levels.

To quote part of the comment you are replying to, copy the sentence you want, paste it, put > in front of it, then leave a blank line before your own reply. The blank line is the part people forget; without it your answer is absorbed into the quote and it reads as though the other person said it.

Markdown's own rule has two parts: a blank line starts a new paragraph, and two spaces at the end of a line force a line break inside the same paragraph. Both work everywhere Reddit is read, including old Reddit and third-party apps.

New Reddit's editor is more forgiving and renders a single newline as a line break in most clients, which is why a comment can look correctly spaced while you write it and then arrive as one solid block for someone reading it elsewhere. Use a blank line to be safe on old Reddit and third-party apps. The toggle in the previewer above switches between the two behaviours, so you can see which of your line breaks actually survive.

Bullets start with -, * or + followed by a space. Numbered lists start with a digit, a period and a space; Reddit renumbers them for you, so a list written entirely with 1. still comes out as 1, 2, 3.

Indent nested items by four spaces. New Reddit will often accept two, but four is what old Reddit's renderer expects and it works on both, so four spaces is the version worth learning. Leave a blank line before the first item of a list that follows a paragraph — without it the list can be pulled into the paragraph above.

Inline code goes in single backticks and is the right choice for a file name, a flag or a single expression. For anything longer, Reddit offers two block forms. Fenced blocks — three backticks on their own line, then your code, then three more — render on new Reddit and are what the composer inserts for you.

Old Reddit does not render fenced blocks; it wants every line of the block indented by four spaces, with a blank line before it. Indented blocks render correctly on both, so a four-space block is the version that looks right for every reader. Reddit does not syntax-highlight either form, and a language identifier after the opening fence is accepted but has no visible effect.

Reddit tables are pipe tables: a header row, a divider row of dashes, then one row per line. The divider row is mandatory — it is what tells the renderer this block is a table at all — and colons inside it set column alignment: :--- for left, :---: for centre and ---: for right.

Both old and new Reddit render tables, but many third-party apps and older mobile clients do not, and a wide table is unreadable on a phone even where it does render. Keep tables to three or four narrow columns, or fall back to a list, when the thread has a mobile-heavy audience.

One to six # characters followed by a space make a heading, largest first. They are genuinely useful in long text posts — a guide, a patch note, a rules post — where they give readers something to scan.

In comments they are usually a mistake. A single # renders very large next to ordinary comment text, so it reads as shouting; most communities treat bold as the comment-level equivalent of a heading.