Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccapitalK | Hacker News Reader

I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?

View on HN

My dev friends used to do this as a sort of inside joke around the office. If you were cool and hip, you wrote emails like this as a way to sort of thumb your nose at the establishment.

I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.

Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.

Everywhere I’ve worked, there’s a funny phenomenon where the people just under the real decision makers use formal language, start emails with salutations and sign them, etc. Whereas the actual decision makers send emails like “can u look in2 this? thx”

I wish non-conformity was more of a thing at points where it actually matters. Your product manager asks you to add invasive user tracking and surveillance? Push back and explain how this makes the world a worse place. Got a ticket to implement a "[yes][ask me later]" dialog [1]? Make a short survey that shows how user hate it. Nobody listens to you? Refuse to comply. The government requires you to take deeply unethical or unlawful actions? Sabotage the feature [2] (or quit/resign).

Performative non-conformance might be e.g. helpful to nurture a culture of critical thinking, but if it is just performative, then it is worthless.

(I write this with no intent to criticize you, burningChrome, or Jyn. You might very well do just that.)

(Also, I'm aware that the ability to push back is very unevenly distributed. I'm addressing those that can afford this agency. And also, non-conformance is spectrum: You can also push back a little without choosing the specific point to be the hill to die on. Every bit counts.)

[1] https://idiallo.com/blog/hostile-not-enshittification

[2] https://www.404media.co/heres-a-pdf-version-of-the-cia-guide...

Yeah, agreed. Otherwise it's a kind of low stakes "non-conformity", even a conformity of sorts (because everything lowercase is/was actually an internet fad, so it's a kind of "extremely online" conformity).

Non-conformity where it matters would be a lot better, but it's also scarier.

Great handle, but also isn’t that the point where it matters if you keep at it?

For me it made the text way more difficult to read. Periods and commas can be sometimes difficult to differentiate for people with poor sight or just on small screens, so having a capital letter next to the dot character is a very relevant visual cue to confirm it was indeed a period and not a comma.

Gen Z linguistic phenomenon. It's to signify a more authentic or calmer, more personable style rather than an overly literary one. It's kind of nice actually, like talking to a friend about their thoughts.

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

It's how we all used to talk on IRC, well before Gen Z came online :)

Yes however I doubt the author was an IRC user. For chats people generay do use lowercase cause it's easier but this article is also about using lowercase outside of chats.

This user I think got it from Tumblr (firmly millennial).

Gen Z I would think default to title case because that’s what smart phones produce when not wrangled.

No they disable auto capitalization explicitly in their keyboards.

That depended on your IRC server of choice.

I grew up on some where you got flamed very quickly if you didn’t clean that up (e.g Espernet).

It goes back to the 1960s TV show, "The Prisoner".[1] In the village, all signage and maps are lower case only, and in a unique font.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osNmf_zmSyE

bauhaus in 1925 has been linked in a peer comment.

i've got a 1926 print book is 5 by e e cummings who famously often used lowercase in his prose and poems ... going back earlier than the collection i have.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_5

* my sweet old etcetera - https://web.archive.org/web/19991008163420/http://www.geocit...

still, as you're a fan of that 1960's show ... here's a few samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dm_iq5OicM (1985)

I'm an elder millennial, and this was a thing on AIM in 2001, and certainly before then in poetry and avant-garde literature.

IME it is a common affectation in the queer / feminist internet. A sort of Tumblr Shibboleth.

I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.

I take typos as "poster was using a standard physical keyboard unit" sometimes.

i do the same, at first naturally because this is how all the cool kids talked on the places of the internet i frequented when i came of age ca. 2000-2005

now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication

- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes

- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos

- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient

all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating

You could say "Please take a look as I think you may have forgotten to add unit tests for Y?"

But in your comment history, you literally don't write like this.

I didn't think twice about it in the article. But I don't read all lowercase as "friendly." It reads curt. Like you didn't have time. Which makes me not want to ask you for help. It's what my boss does when he has 12 seconds to help people, and it discourages people from messaging him.

It also makes it hard to read where a sentence ends.

I'm a little surprised to see so many people not just say this is a better way to write, but that merely capitalizing your sentences is the corpo propaganda way of writing.

I have apparently been in a bubble based on the other commenter saying this was a gen z phenomenon.

Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.

I use "text-transform: lowercase;". It's just a fun look. When I get tired of it I'll just remove the property.

Thank you, I just did the opposite in Microsoft teams PWA, "text-transform: uppercase;", now I feel like the whole company is mad, everyone using shouty caps at each other, and every message makes me laugh!

Easy fix :)

  function f(n){n.childNodes.forEach(c=>{c.nodeType===3?c.textContent=c.textContent.replace(/(^|[.!?]\s+)([a-z])/g,(m,s,l)=>s+l.toUpperCase()):c.nodeType===1&&f(c)})}f(document.body)

Maybe they're anti-capitalist.

bravo

welcome to tumblr!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com