> This formatting is intolerable on mobile.

Yeah, people really need to stop prefixing lines with 4 spaces when quoting something on HN. It needlessly forces a fixed width font with fixed width columns.

Just prepend a > to show you're quoting something. There's already precedent for it from e-mail and newsgroups, and most forums already use it for quoting. Make it italics if you want it to stand out a bit more.