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Comment by ahoef | Hacker News Reader

Nice article, but this is hard to read without proper capitalization. My brain uses capitals to scan beginning and ending of text.

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Young people (like me) use lowercaps like that all the time. Around 50% of the young people I know purposefully turn off auto-caps on their phone.

Why? I really couldn't say. I think we just like the feel of it. The only reason I type with proper capitalization on HN and my blog is because I know older people read it.

I’m middle-aged. I’ve noticed in the last few months more and more articles with this style. Something I’ve never seen before in blogging or article writing.

I usually notice the style at some point but this time I had no idea until this other commenter pointed it out. I guess I am getting acclimatized.

Using uppercase is for writing (more formal).

using lowercase is for chat (less formal)

I was similarly fascinated by the stylistic choices made here. No capitalisation of even any names, no hyphen in a compound adjective, but dots and commas and spaces are deemed necessary, also before "and" where the word clearly acts as separator already. If you look at the waveform of speech, we have no spaces between regular words so, if they want to eliminate unnecessary flourishes... though perhaps (since text largely lacks intonation markers) that makes it too unreadable compared to the other changes. All this is somehow at least as fascinating to me as the vulnerability being described!

It’s just another dumb social media trend, like tYpiNg LiKe tHiS. Hopefully it too will phase out. Search for “lowercase trend” and you’ll find reports of it going years back, there’s nothing worth being fascinated about.

It has seeped into HN as well. Look closely and you’ll notice several commenters type like that.

I use it to indicate tone. Proper capitalization and punctuation reads with a formal, cold tone.

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

That's really interesting, I personally don't read those tone differences based on the casing. Neither approach carries different warmth or formality to me at all.

I wonder if this is a regional or generational thing?

> I wonder if this is a regional or generational thing?

Generational is a good bet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41537994

It's definitely primarily generational. In my experience, capitalization-as-tone is used by many Generation Z people. On the other hand, it is not widely used by older generations, or the younger Generation Alpha.

> lowercase without caps reads with a warmer, informal tone

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).

That's true. I agree with you that anything less than a formal tone would be, and is, inappropriate for this context. I also respect that you prefer standard capitalization and punctuation at all times. Being aware of the audience is critical for any writer.

> lowercase without caps reads with a warmer, informal tone

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.

Relax, buddy.

To me, proper capitalization is easier to parse - not massively so, but a little bit. So writing without caps is a bit of a jerk move. You're making it harder for me to read, either because you're lazy or because you want to affect a style. In either case it's a bit of a jerk move.

It's more of a jerk move when it's done on a discussion board, because what you write once is read multiple times. So the cost multiplies, but (if due to laziness) the benefit only occurs once.

Now, in something like texting, I understand, when you're trying to type on that teeny phone keyboard. It's harder to hit the shift key when you don't have a spare finger because you're only using one. But for something like here, take the time and the effort to make it better for your readers.

On a formal discussion board like this, I don't believe an informal tone is correct. To me, it doesn't make it harder to read, but it does come across as mildly disrespectful of the environment.

When texting on a phone, the default is to automatically capitalize. Using all-lowercase requires more work than doing nothing. It isn't lazy or even more efficient to go back and replace your "I"s with "i"s. With the right reader, it's done to give them a better idea of the tone you wish to deliver.

With that said, it requires a certain degree of audience awareness. Many people do not interpret lack of capitalization the same way I do, as evidenced by this thread. On my phone, I have auto-capitalization disabled. When texting someone for the first time, I tend to use proper capitalization, even if I want a casual tone. I just did a typing test with capitalization and punctuation and scored 55 wpm on my phone. It's a choice I make and it varies based on audience, and intended tone. Effort, on the other hand, is not a factor.

I use lowercase in most places precisely because it forces me to use shorter sentences and split text into paragraphs. The result is easier on the reader.

It's just a habit from chat rooms and instant messengers of the beginning of this century. Most of my mates who write like that are well over 30.

This whole subthread is one projection after another.

How does lower case force you to do that? It seems to me that it's completely orthogonal to sentence length and paragraph splitting. (But then, I use uppercase, so maybe I don't understand the dynamic.)

> Now, in something like texting, I understand, when you're trying to type on that teeny phone keyboard. It's harder to hit the shift key when you don't have a spare finger because you're only using one.

Mobile operating systems (or is it just iOS?) by default turn the shift on automatically when starting a new sentence and are pretty consistently fast and right. It’s more surprising to me when someone doesn’t use proper capitalisation from mobile.

It's extremely irritating, distracting, and breaks focus on the content instead of the annoying stylistic choice, just an fyi..but I imagine you probably like that this is true and purposely try to annoy the people that aren't in the little club. If not, then I suggest not doing it. The tone I perceive from it is "F**** the reader"

> ... you probably like that this is true and purposely try to annoy ...

I don't know if you meant to direct this at the person you're replying to but I'm convinced the overwhelming majority of people don't get out of bed in the morning with any of that in mind

It's comments like these that make me reconsider what hateful meanings others might read into my communications or mistakes

Yes I mean this to anyone repeatedly, consciously fighting natural convention and muscle memory to purposely type every letter in lowercase, knowing that this produces in the reader a slight dissonance and distraction constantly, and choosing to do this instead of using convention that everyone understands so that "syntax" does not become the focus and instead the content of the message does.

Otherwise they're "drawing attention" to the style and themselves for narcissistic reasons. I would simply assume they'd have to know the annoyance this brings to the reader, so I assume it's on purpose.

I would feel the same about someone writing code in a consistently purposeful unorthodox style and against convention in such an obvious and effortful way that no one is used to. Personally, and YMMV, I like to try to write in as clear a way as I can to get my point across as much as possible. Useless stylistic fluff in something that isn't poetry, seems counter to that purpose.

>mistakes

It's not a mistake though to ensure every letter one writes is not following convention and English syntax. Accidents and mistakes are a different thing.

Strange to label a failure to capitalize words as a "dumb social media trend", as I'm sure people have been doing that for many years prior to social media.

And nobody tYpEs lIkE tHiS except when making a joke.

> Strange to label a failure to capitalize words

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.

What do you mean by "before" social media here? Surely not handwritten or typewritered letters, I guess you mean like 2005-2010ish?

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

Social media? I remember people doing the lowercase thing back on IRC. It was an indicator of informality and "coolness".

If you were using Arc you could add a Boost for "Case: toggle between different capitalization settings - they will apply to all text on the webpage" [1]

[1] https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19212718608151-B...

this made me laugh. 10/10

Depending on the version you are using, you might not even need to add it, someone else might just add it for you!

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