The thing you are calling “quotes” is a code block, and the thing you are calling lists is no formatting at all, just HN presenting exactly the text you entered.
People use code blocks as quotes quite often, much to the chagrin of mobile users, but nonetheless, their being used as quotes make them de facto quotes on this site.
With regards to lists, as I can create them, that's all that matters, again the formatting doesn't need to be special, it just needs to exist.
> People use code blocks as quotes quite often, much to the chagrin of mobile users, but nonetheless, their being used as quotes make them de facto quotes on this site.
They aren't markdown quotes, which was the claim made. “People on the site use HN’s almost-markdown code blocks for quotes” is true. HN supports markdown code blocks and markdown quotes is not; it supports code blocks in a way that approximates markdowns, and has no separate quote functionality.
> With regards to lists, as I can create them, that's all that matters, again the formatting doesn't need to be special, it just needs to exist.
But...it doesn't. HN allowing you to type text and not transforming it at all isn't support for markdown (or any other kind of) lists. The claim upthread was that lists were another markdown feature that HN supported. It does not. Now, it's true that markdown’s markup for lists is itself a manner commonly used for presenting lists in unformatted text (a very big part of the idea of markdown is that it follows convention for plain-text presentation so that it is readable and recognizable without processing), but not recognizing or transforming a markdown feature isn't support for that markdown feature, even if by the nature of markdown the absence of transformation still leaves the intent recognizable.
