Because it’s meant to be a block of code, not something that the user is able to interact with. The point of code blocks is that you can use special characters and have them rendered as plaintext, instead of actually working as special characters. For instance, here’s the classic Reddit shrug:
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Notice that the left arm is missing? That’s because the backslash and underscores are both special characters. The backslash cancels out the underscore, making the backslash disappear. Now here’s the same shrug formatted as code:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Notice that the left arm is visible, (or at least, it should be), because none of the characters were treated as special characters. If the left arm is invisible on your client, that is actually an error in parsing the MarkDown formatting.
markz@suppo.fi 1 week ago
Code blocks are for displaying raw text, ignoring all formatting.