It was a thing back in the late 90s. I still do it in casual conversations with friends, less so in professional settings.

It's a gen X thing, like using "lol" to mean literal laughter

it's been a thing at least on irc for at least 20 years. i've been used to it for a long time.

I like to call it informal case.

When I grew up online in the 90s, on IRC, AOL/AIM, ICQ and web forums, it was extremely common. Most of the people I know from then still do it, and I still do it with them and in many other places, although for whatever reason I don't do it here. Although it's 50/50 when on their phones now that phones auto-capitalize by default now.

Rules are put in place to be followed, for a reason. Capital letters at the start of the sentence increase readability. People who don't bother with them are being incosiderate towards their readers.

yes but there could be many possible reasons, for instance

- it's muuch faster on mobile

- you're aiming to convey litheness to potential target audiences who will know to recognize it as intentional litheness

- you've gotten used to minimizing the amount of keystrokes necessary for communicating things, to the point it's second nature

- you've worked a lot in the past with older nlp systems, where ignoring capitalization was a given for inputs anyhow, and just got used to treating it as syntactic cruft only strictly necessary in more formal settings ;)

I have been thinking of this too. I find it super annoying to read and it looks unprofessional.

how does this bother you, what greater meaning does it have?

It’s a techbro thing.

Sama does it too

It’s a low effort flex. As in: you’re unimportant, this is unimportant, and I’m very busy, so I can’t or won’t bother to capitalize. Which is ironic because it’s more effort to not capitalize.