Why HTML over Markdown? There is no semantic benefit here. In fact Markdown has much clearer ways to define metadata like post date, user, community, URL etc (the front-matter at the top of the document)
JSON is sort of human-readable, and it's a decent alternative.
Markdown is a plain text format that can render to HTML, but that is a lot easier to read and edit. It's widely known, used and supported. I run multiple websites that are Markdown files rendered into HTML templates. Most static site generators work that way.
PDF makes no sense here as we're talking about storing a few lines of text plus a few lines of metadata. It would make the files difficult to read on small screens, and very hard to read by machines.
I want to store my social media posts, comments and conversations in a standard format. They should be stored in simple, human-readable formats. I should be able to browse these files without specialised software.
I've been using Markdown for my websites and my recipes. I can open them as plain text, or use any of the dozens of Markdown viewers out there. Scripts can also work with those files without much effort. I find it preferable to databases and XML files.
I was wondering if there are common human-readable formats for chat logs, social media posts and social media comments.
So far, the best I can come up with is Markdown for social media content, and IRC chat logs for conversations. Is there anything better out there?