I implemented this on my forum (back when I had a forum) and I used it all the time. A lot of other users did too. It was a hit and I think I have an explanation for why. In "Designing With the Mind in Mind", a book on the psychology of people when they are interacting with computers, it talks about how precious and limited a person's working memory is. Working memory, if you don't know, is basically all the things we are aware of at a given time. ( It doesn't quite mean the same thing as attention or short term memory, but if it's easier for you to think of it that way, you can.) Human working memory is like running a computer with only 100KB of RAM or something insanely small like that. It fills up very quickly and if it wants to add something else, it has to kick stuff out to make room. And like RAM, it's volatile. It's just electrical activity in the brain. Once the activity for something stops, it's gone. If it got saved to long term memory (much like a hard drive) it's possible for it to be retrieved later but still it is no longer readily available to the person. So how does this relate to quoting? Well over the years I've found that people are really bad at remembering what they said in posts and it's probably because by the time I respond, their working memory has long since moved on to thinking about other stuff. So if I want to go through their post and make comments on on specific parts, I quote exactly what I'm responding to so they can be reminded. Here's an example. Let's say Stan made a big post introducing us to his sock puppet collection. I read it and I have a few things to say. So I quote the relevant parts of Stan's post and put my comments below, like so: "This is Binky. He's my favorite because his eyes go in different directions." I agree, He's adorbs. "And then this one is a cactus, so I named him Mr. Cuddles." You should cuddle with him. "And I used to have one more sock puppet but I think my dryer ate him." Oh no! Let's organize a search party! Haha. See how I can be more immediate and conversational in my responses? I think this helps promote community because it bridges time and space. It makes it so you can react to stuff like it just happened. And yeah I could just, by hand, copy and paste what I want and manually put quotes around it. But having the feature built in has a few advantages: #1 The site can automatically format the quoted text to communicate that it's quoted text, not something you wrote yourself #2 That will also make it really easy to visually distinguish the quoted text from the original text in a post #3 It makes for a much better user experience especially on a phone where copying and pasting is tedious. And yeah, maybe not everybody would use this, but I think if a lot of people were using it, a lot of other people would see the value and start using it as well. Just my two cents.