For those who actually don’t know: MarkDown (the markup language used by Lemmy and Reddit) uses the backslash as a “cancel” command. And it uses the underscores as an italicize command, just like the asterisks you’re probably in the habit of using.
For instance, this turns into this. But when I cancel those underscores with a backslash like this they appear.
So why does the backslash disappear on the ¯(ツ)/¯ face? For starters, the backslash cancels the underscores around the head. So the underscores show up, but the arm doesn’t. So what if we try two backslashes? Then we get:
¯(ツ)/¯
The first backslash canceled out the second, but now the underscores are italicizing the head. So let’s try three:
¯(ツ)/¯
Now the first backslash is canceling out the second, and the third backslash is canceling out the underscore.