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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

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"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Of course annoyances are annoying, but they're also distracting, and they tend to get stuck at the top of threads, choking out more interesting conversation.)

I definitely find it difficult, cognitively, for long-form writing. It's also the second time recently I've seen all-lowercase blog-post-length content, after previously having never seen it, so I wonder if something is happening culturally to pull text-message style formatting up into the rank of published content.

My guess is it’s meant to come off as more authentic and conversational, like an informal chat.

It's often used as a tone signifier: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...

Yeah, I suspect that's the intention. There's a definitely a cultural break. To me, lowercase creates a casual tone in texts/chat. But in long form, especially published (i.e. purposefully displayed to an audience), it sends me a tone of disinterest or laziness at worst; or at best, simple innocent ignorance/mistakenness (like misspelling). Clearly neither is the case here though.

oh yeah i definitely agree! the tone communication can be useful but in longform writing it gets very grating and confusing/distracting. it's also just more social engineering to pretend to be authentic when one is clearly not.

i prefer this type of writing for comedy generally

Probably an article written by an LLM which has been instructed to look _more human_.

I guess time will tell if this is a new ‘thing’ people do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's fine in tweets and even HN/Reddit comments, but it becomes a tacky affectation when used in longer form, deliberate content.

I wonder if unconventional writing styles are becoming the signal for deliberate content. If text is too polished– or even using certain punctuation– can lead to readers questioning whether AI assisted in the creation of the text.

A quick search shows that others have made this connection between Altman and lowercase and non-AI authenticity: https://ted-merz.com/2023/12/18/writing-in-lowercase/

It looks like this particular blog previously used conventional capitalization from 2017 to late 2023. The first post in this style appears to hint at a kind of shift in identity of the author, so perhaps, in this instance it is more a signal of personal expression or tribalism than non-AI-ness. Then again, we may see the line between the two continue to blur.

No. It's obnoxious signaling/tribal adherence. Relevant [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4ifVvgZU58&t=623s

I waste brain cycles correcting the author's formatting mistakes while simultaneously trying to understand the meaning. Thus I read slower, but not the productive kind of slow reading—I am not contemplating the concepts more deeply. I am slowed down by a lazy lack of editing, for no gain.

Not sure what it has to do with Sam Altman though.

it's pretentiousness thinly disguised as modesty.

trust me.

What I find pretentious is the legion of commenters who can't find anything better to comment on and instead pretend they're smart by nitpicking some stylistic choice in the most low-effort way possible.

Classic case of "you're pretentious", "no, you're pretentious". It's exhausting how often we reach for the word "pretentious" when we have bitter feelings about one person's opinion of another person or their work.

I just used it because he did. My real feeling was exhaustion. More of those comments than comments about the subject matter of the post. Like going to a swimming meet as a pro and finding it full of kids instead.

I was trying to be ironical.

You can use your ad blocker to lowercase the entire internet like this

  *##body:style(text-transform: lowercase !important;)

it might become bearable eventually.

It's cool if you're on desktop Slack or Messenger or something between friends, but making a conscious choice to go into your phone's settings and turn capitalization off for everything you do is a bit weird and over the top.

Seems to be a trend though now to do it everywhere in public. I've seen the htmx author do that and the guy who wrote the second forked version of opencode.

Weird. I actually never noticed that while reading the entire article. And I'm almost 50. No idea what that says about me.

I'd closed the tab by the end of the first sentence. If the author can't be bothered, then neither can I. I tend to find people who do this have a superiority complex, they think they're so much better than everyone else that they're justified in offloading their own tiny cognitive load on to everybody else.

The author put a lot of effort into actually writing the thing, and correctly capitalized quotes, which clearly indicates a stylistic choice. You aren't willing to read text that isn't written in your preferred style, but you believe it's the author who has a superiority complex?

They didn't put enough effort in. It's not a preferred style, it's correct written English.

So, you barely read one sentence, then went to the comments, read an entire thread, and took the time to post about how the author probably thinks they are superior to you?

I strongly recommend rethinking that approach. You ascribed intentions to the author and then spent more time getting upset about them than you did interacting with the content.

There are actually interesting points in that text, yet here we are getting fussy about the author's supposed lack of decorum. That's really disappointing to me.

Funnily enough, I didn't read an entire thread, I read that one comment and posted an agreement to it. I'm not overly fussed if you are disappointed in me.

It's something I experimented with as an edgy teenager. It's not something I'd expect from an adult.

I do it a lot, do me a favor and don't attribute it to Sam Altman since some of us have been doing this for a long time. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it, but you also don't need to be patronizing and close-minded about how others choose to express themselves.

I think writing like this is disrespectful to your audience since they have to put in extra effort to parse your text. If you choose to express yourself like that, fine, but it's not patronizing to point this out.

Maybe you're not the intended audience! :)

i tend to draft everything lowercase, and then go back and uppercase things depending on how much of a formal vibe i'm going for. capitalization rarely helps me formulate an idea, and so my writing often splits into phases: (1) formulation, (2) polish.

also, it's worth noting that proper capitalization does not automatically yield text worth reading. from that perspective, i like lower case text as a form of rebellion against the artifice of rules; any rebellion against particular aesthetics is fair game in my book. more generally, i'm skeptical of process advocacy in cases where the process seems to be done for its own sake.

on the flip side, good grammar helps me parse sentences, so i do sympathize with arguments in its favor.

I find all lowercase messes with my parser, and is fustrating to read. I think I may treat sentences as a single unit, and use the capitilization to detect the boundaries. Without it I find bouncing to/from sentences slower (which can happen if a latter sentence/paragraph adds more context, and I want to revisit the previous idea).

Interestingly your semi-colons stand out much stronger than the periods for me.

CAPITALS AT LAST

https://archive.org/details/livestimesofarch0000marq/page/20...

Good meme.

i like it. maybe because i grew up with phones and texting but having perfect punctuation reads very formal to me, and if im reading a personal blog post i assume its casual reading. if i get a text that ends in a period mark, i assume the person typing it is MAD. i also just like lowercase glyphs more they look more pleasing to me

I didn't know that was a thing. It's purpose seems to be different for the sake of being different.

"I" being capitalized is one of the most weird quirks of the English language.

I agree. A quick search tells me the practice was started for legibility in hand-written manuscripts [1], or for that and also to emphasize the importance of the writer (seems egotistical to me :)) [2], or those reasons and also to help distinguish English from other languages but we don't really know [3].

[1] http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxwhyisi.html [2] https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/whycapitali/ [3] https://greatbigstory.com/why-do-we-capitalize-the-word-i/

arguably it makes what would otherwise be a very little letter stand out more in text

No.

Agreed. Honestly - life's too short to read a text the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalize correctly.

for reasons I don't (want to) understand, lowercase i and psychopathic credit stealing prompting seem to yield best results for llms... e.g. "i want xyz how do i do it, ok please do so", not "I'm trying to do xyz. Could you guide me through?"

Tell me you didn't grow up on IRC and AIM without telling me you didn't grow up on IRC and AIM

I did grow up on IRC and AIM. I use all-lowercase even today in text-messaging. I explicitly undo autocapitalization of "lol", and so on.

But the topic is long-form, published content. Writing styles communicate tone, which may change culturally with generations.

i hate this writing style so much. i have to do extra work fighting autocorrect to make it seem like i just rolled out of bed and typed it out on my phone. i am so smart, see, i don't care about Big Establishment Grammar, my ideas are so good it will pierce through

My output is so high that editing anything more completely than iOS automatically handles for me is a waste of my time

... or people who type in lowercase just keep autocorrect off?

your brain is only fighting it because it's expecting capitalization, the same way parens put new lisp users off and javascript has difficulty shedding its semicolons; it's all just struggling to let go of something that was drilled into you.

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