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It's perfectly fine if the style puts you off. You're not wrong for having your own tastes. You're just not the audience for that particular site. Nobody can please everybody.
I suspect this is actually more interesting than base sloppiness.
My first experience with instant messaging was on ICQ (and IRC a year or two later once my Internet usage wasn’t being billed by the minute), and to this day I don’t capitalize or end single-sentence replies with a period in IM situations. The no-period thing is mostly universal—I believe I’ve seen an article in a linguistics journal about how a final period “feels aggressive”—, but I’ve noticed people who learned on smartphones using keyboards with automatic capitalization do, which just looks unnatural to me.
So if someone writes a blog post not as an article, but as a monologue in this kind of conversational style, I can see how they could come to not capitalize and use newlines as sentence breaks. I believe that style is (was?) somewhat popular on Tumblr? I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t more popular on Twitter before the 140-character was lifted.
I’ve heard that communication over IM is actually linguistically interesting (the whole thing, of course, not the punctuation)—in most ways it works like a spoken (or signed) conversation, except it’s expressed in writing. So it’s not entirely unexpected that it can develop conventions that are unlike that of the normal written word. And despite the thousands of years people have been using writing, there isn’t really precedent for this kind of thing before computers.
(I’m also not convinced anything good comes out of trying to attract a generically wider audience.)
To me, laid off twice in 18 months, currently three months unemployed, engaging daily with the Sisyphean madness that is finding a tech job in 2024, the author's darkly humorous, off-the-cuff style resonated deeply.
Given the attention it's getting here, I can only presume I'm not alone.
I 100% understand how the article could be off-putting to some, but to unemployeds like me it was cathartic.
Do you actually want to understand the answer to this question?
“When The Wealth of Nations was first published in March 1776 David Hume wrote to his old friend in terms of the greatest praise, while qualifying his hopes by remarking that ‘the reading of it necessarily requires so much attention, and the public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very popular’. (Corr., letter 150.) Strahan, Smith’s publisher, wrote very much in the same vein when commenting that the sales of the book had been much more ‘than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers) to peruse to any purpose’. (Corr., p. 193 n.)”
Excerpt From
The Wealth of Nations Books I-III
Adam Smith
Appropriately enough, this style of blogging is at least fifteen years old if not older. It's not all that different from the format of Joel Spolsky's blog.
It is frustrating to read because it is unclear. Even more frustrating is the over-reliance on memes and inside jokes.
I, too, despise this style of writing.