I used one of the Unicode bullets instead of a hyphen (◉). I understand what dang is getting at here — it's in the same spirit as stripping emojis (because otherwise we'd be drowning in them). I'm a past graphic designer so I'm accustomed to working with the medium to achieve maximum communicative impact, but I don't mind operating within constraints.

The convention of using hyphens to start a bulleted list isn't officially documented AFAIK. Having to separate bulleted list items with double newlines is a little weird, but it's fine.

You don't have to use hyphens for that. Asterisks are fine (see https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc for how to get a *) and no doubt there are other ways within the plaintext convention.