What formatting options (bold, bullet points, headings) improve readability?

Reddit uses a variant of Markdown for formatting in both posts and comments. On the new desktop interface, a rich-text toolbar provides clickable buttons for most formatting options; on older interfaces and mobile, you enter Markdown syntax directly. Understanding how to use these tools meaningfully — rather than decoratively — significantly improves how your content reads. Bold text, created with double asterisks around a word or phrase (**like this**), draws the eye to the most important terms or phrases. Use it to highlight key takeaways, critical caveats, or the most important part of a long sentence. Using it too liberally makes everything seem equally important, which defeats the purpose. Italics, created with single asterisks or underscores, work well for titles of books or films, for gentle emphasis, or to indicate a foreign term. Headers, created by starting a line with one or more hash symbols (# Header, ## Subheader), are useful for long posts that cover multiple distinct topics. They allow readers to scan and jump to the section relevant to them. Using headers in a short post feels overwrought and is generally unnecessary for anything under three to four paragraphs. Horizontal rules (three hyphens on their own line) can visually separate major sections without the formality of headers. Bullet points and numbered lists are excellent for presenting a set of parallel items — tips, steps in a process, a list of options — but they can make a post feel clinical or impersonal when used to break apart what should be flowing prose. Many communities actively dislike posts written entirely as bullet lists, perceiving them as low-effort. The formatting guide in Reddit's help section covers code blocks (single backtick for inline, triple backtick for multi-line), blockquotes (a leading > character), superscript (caret before text), and strikethrough (double tilde). Each of these tools improves readability when used contextually rather than applied by default.