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Comment by flumpcakes | Hacker News Reader

Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting:

I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.

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My take is that it stems from the way we chat with others online, where we might be freer with our formatting as we type out messages in IRC/Discord/wherever. It's meant to convey "down to earth"-ness or speaking plainly, which I find fitting given the content of the post.

It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar.

They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.

It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).

hitting upper case on each word doesn't feel ergonomic but rather aesthetical. if we have periods, why do we need upper case? or why we don't have auto-capitalize globally activated in every text-box? as someone who type like this on my blog; i refuse to hit shift everytime i bring a period into any text, as well not using period at the end of any paragraph and not capitalizing "i", because otherwise, i want "YOU" and "WE" and "HE" and "THOU /j

The other one that I find jarring is putting a zero in front of the year.

I down vote it every time I see it.

You're going to look silly in 8000 years!

Why would they look silly?

We don't refer to the year 700 as 0700. Tt'll be perfectly natural in 8000 years to see "10025" for the year.

But it will be very marginally more challenging to correctly sort string representations of years!

i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone hastily formatted into a blog post, or something constructed to resemble that. the rushed construction slash abrasive rhetorical tool kinda matches the message it's trying to send, imo. it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little). the graphics feel like someone sending an image in between chat messages

> it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little)

oh, this is a really good way of putting it! that’s exactly what happened :)

Are you saying that you were too busy thinking to put capitals at the start of sentences？ Is that a joke?

Phones will automatically add the basic correct grammar for you. I would also argue that if you can touch type then writing in all lowercase is again more difficult than adding the correct (basic) grammar.

>i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone

I don't know about Android but on the iPhone you have to go out of your way to remove the capitalisation.

this is gonna sound antagonistic but i promise it's not: you're absolutely right! but people do go into the settings and disable auto-capitalization, and it's pretty much how young and/or queer people type nowadays

I don't find it any harder or easier. Reading is not difficult and hasn't been since kindergarten for me. If anything, the British bastardizations of the Oxford spelling of words like "capitalization" with a z, because Pocket Fowler's Modern English thought the Americans were too crude and wished to emulate a more continental style, makes reading clumsier.

I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.

Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.

eNGLISH is a lingua franca, so it's prone to morph much more than without the status. do you really think a blogger or 5 will change how upper case exist? maybe we'll signal something with exacerbation by some unicode somewhere at the phrase. maybe we'll type with the help of AI (fuck ai). maybe English will have augmentative and diminutive word forms like Portuguese. maybe grammar will be simpler, so more people can use it and even with a simpler language, like Chinese, you still can express deep stuff, with more words/characters but then, how often your typing or reading something serious? there's a big difference between a blog and a journal from a psychologist evaluating meaningless activities as the precursor/variable of hapiness or satisfaction (or whatever the correct scientific term is)

Hopefully this conversation plays out a million times whenever someone decides to make sentence boundaries harder to recognise for no reason, and together we can all make a difference.

> I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.

what have they done, other than essentially nothing, to reading comprehension?

maDe iT muCH WORse for aNyone wITH A viSUAL OR COgniTive impaiRment bY trEATinG capItalIsation as UNImporTanT.

I hate that people comment on this. It's a fascinating linguistic phenomenon that bothers some people but signals to others that it's for them, in a way. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, field. Humans have been speaking and writing in a myriad of ways for thousands of years that do not strictly correspond to the current du jour.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...

I hate it. It’s so much harder for me to read when they opt out of using some of the tools in their written language toolbox.

My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.

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