[RagnarD]

When did this writing with no capitalization start to become a thing? I'm seeing it too often now. It's pretentious crap and quickly leads to me thinking that the writer doesn't want to be taken seriously, so why read it?

[thornewolf]

I started typing in no caps in most conversation around 2013-2016, when I first started playing League of Legends and using Discord. Other people from this same age bracket as me have similar experiences (if they were "chronically" online) and similar behavior patterns. It's not pretentious imo.

[mexicocitinluez]

same.

also, it has it's own voice. a little less serious.

I can correctly capitalize if I wish, but I like I like the less formal take on text.

[mnsc]

I read the whole thing without seeing it. But I also fail to see how you marry "pretentious" with not wanting to be taken seriously. So maybe it's me.

[disruptiveink]

If you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness? You're going into extra trouble to signify you're part of a clique, while feigning "laid-backness" and "i dont even care bro".

But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.

[einr]

This probably has to do with what kind of Internet milieu you grew up in because to me — grown up on IRC and certain late 90s/early 00s web forums — lowercase everything signals a sort of chill, easygoing humility while properly capsing in a casual setting like chat can feel overbearing, pretentious and self-important.

[minajevs]

in 1925

https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...

[omnicognate]

> as is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either.

Of all fatuous nonsenses I've heard from design "geniuses" over the years, that might take the prize.

We don't look at spoken words, we listen to them. We add audible prosody (both pauses and intonation changes, in particular) to segment our speech. If we were to optimise our spoken language for lip-readers, we might very well choose to add some extra visible segmentation to compensate for the intonation being mostly undetectable.

You could validly claim that capital letters are superfluous given the presence of full stops (and I would disagree and we could debate that), but this argument that capital letters are bad because we don't speak "big sounds" is absurd.

[cenamus]

> it is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either

We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.

[feurio]

LOOKITCOULDBEWORSESOJUSTCHILLANDTRYNOTTOWORRYABOUTITTOOMUCHOK

[haddr]

It probably starts with the habit of writing words without using the Shift key or diacritics. Just to be quick. At least, that’s how I’ve noticed this behavior in myself.

[lloeki]

I've seen - and used - such nocaps patterns as far back as the 90's on IRC.

As I remember there was no singular reason; not having to pinky-press shift was definitely a factor.

[bnrdr]

A lot of the comments here are bashing you, but I just wanted to say that I feel the same. I find it jarring and off putting.

[hiccuphippo]

It's like xml vs html, some people really like their markup to have explicit closing/self-closed tags, others don't really care and expect the user-agent (the reader) to parse them correctly. Same with semicolons in Javascript.

[rvz]

Most people usually see common scammers writing emails with no capitalization to scam their victims, especially if it is not their first language.

More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.

So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.

[everybodyknows]

Capitalization aids the eye in its search for sentence breaks; it makes reading easier.

[WorldMaker]

In the 1990s, this was called "whispering" and had pockets in BBS/CompuServe/AOL/usenet discussions. Also why I still think of all caps as shouting and can't be convinced otherwise (looking at Microsoft and a few other companies and their designers that keep going through phases insisting all caps is a useful flavor in UI design and not shouting for attention that they don't need).

[umanwizard]

It is something people born 2000 and later do to try to sound cool and detached. It's really no more complicated than that.

[ycombinete]

So basically the text version of the gen z stare.

[attila-lendvai]

i started typing no caps at least a decade ago (and i'm 50). the reason was mostly that when i edited a sentence i had to mess around with caps, plus speed and pinky strain.

learning about Lojban and its punctuation probably also swayed me (it marks the start of the sentences with punctuation, which makes a lot more sense).

[andai]

My spider sense tells me it has to do with lesbian anarchism, as explained in Douglas Coupland's jPod.

[pluralmonad]

Probably unintentional, but the word spider stacked on anarchism definitely made me try to understand what lesbian arachnids had to do with anything.

[stronglikedan]

capitalization has never been a requirement - it's not even part of grammar nor is punctuation

[egypturnash]

pretty sure i saw people doing it back in the eighties on local dialup bbs's

why do you think it's "pretentious" to be too exhausted to bother hitting the shift key

[redherring22]

It may not be pretentious, but pretending that an extra 1-2 keystrokes per sentence is "exhausting" is pretty sad.

[antoniojtorres]

relax

[fruitworks]

No

[rzzzt]

don't do it

[AndyMcConachie]

He's just having fun.

[purplesyringa]

It's "they" (https://github.com/jyn514)

[cons0le]

bruh, we're never making it to space as a society if you can't stop getting hung up on pointless shit like this

who friggen cares? why can the president diddle kids, but a random internet user has to have perfect grammar to be taken seriously?

the poster of this article could probably not care less if you "take them seriously"

i actually interact with ideas, not grammar. Especially in a fun personal blog post like this

[SilverSlash]

I think Sam Altman popularized it with his tweets during the height of OpenAI, GPT popularity ~2023. Or maybe it was already trending by then but at least for me he was the first among prominent people to be doing it.

[monerozcash]

Smartphones forced automated capitalization on us, just look at how chatlogs have changed over time. I'd suggest no-capitalization is on the downtrend, but sticks out more because everything is automatically capitalized now.

[bluedel]

the lack of capitalization (and occasional omission of punctuation) was already a big thing on tumblr / twitter 10 years ago, especially in some anime and LGBT-adjacent spaces. I don't think jyn got it from Sam Altman, and I don't think he had that big a role in popularizing it.

[mock-possum]

“Sam Altman popularized written prose without capitalization by the way he posted to twitter 3 years ago” is one of the wildest takes I have ever heard

[thawawaycold]

imho it was definitely popular before and altman adopted it to fit in with the online crowd

[bnrdr]

The author indeed seems to start using the same style in 2023: https://jyn.dev/tags/ideas/

[Zolomon]

This has been my perception of the timeline as well.