It has seeped into HN as well. Look closely and you’ll notice several commenters type like that.
lowercase without caps reads with a warmer, informal tone
there’s a Tom Scott Language Files video documenting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS4X1JfX6_Q
I wonder if this is a regional or generational thing?
Personally, and I’m certain I’m not alone on this, it reads as annoying. It’s harder to follow and looks as if the writer didn’t care to do the bare minimum to make the text accessible and clear to the reader.
> there’s a Tom Scott Language Files video documenting it
Per that video (thank you for sharing), capital letters “make a paragraph easier to read” and “context matters” and “the conventions change fairly quickly” and typing in all lowercase is “sometimes okay”.
This is a post documenting a serious browser vulnerability, shared to the wide internet, not an informal conversation between buddies. Clarity matters. I don’t fully buy the tone argument and find words and sentence structure are more important. Take the following two examples:
> Just heard about your promotion, you beautiful bastard! Let’s go get pissed to celebrate, on me!
And:
> good afternoon mrs bartlet. the limousine will be available in twenty minutes. i would also like to apologise for my behaviour yesterday when i inadvertently insulted your husband it was a faux pas i promise will not be repeated. my resignation will be on your desk by noon.
I get that language evolves. You do you. Personally I hope this trend subsides like so many others before it. Maybe you don’t like to read properly structured text and prefer all lowercase. My preference is the reverse. And that’s OK, we don’t all have to be the same. I merely wish that people who prefer a certain style understand not everyone will see it the same way they do (and I’m including myself).
No, it reads as "I'm uneducated and don't know how to write the English language properly". It's incredibly obnoxious for people to use as an affectation.
And nobody tYpEs lIkE tHiS except when making a joke.
It’s not a failure, it’s a conscious choice.
> as I'm sure people have been doing that for many years prior to social media.
But now it’s happening more frequently. That’s what “trend” means. It doesn’t mean it never happened before.
> And nobody tYpEs lIkE tHiS except when making a joke.
Just because you don’t know people like that, does not mean they don’t exist. The world is bigger than one person’s knowledge. I personally knew several teenagers who did it for all their communication, before smartphones. The speed at which they were able to do it was astounding.
The term wasn't popular then but with reddit's and Facebook's infancies being twenty years ago, "social media" (which I understand to refer to platforms where you can talk to people and post things about different topics, so broader and more person-oriented than an SMF forum but narrower than the WWW) have been around for a while
The first time I saw lowercase writing like this was two years ago on the Discord guild/community of a game which got popular on tiktok. I don't know the average age but the (statistical) mode was probably in the range of 13–16
