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.