When did this writing with no capitalization start to become a thing? I'm seeing it too often now. It's pretentious crap and quickly leads to me thinking that the writer doesn't want to be taken seriously, so why read it?
also, it has it's own voice. a little less serious.
I can correctly capitalize if I wish, but I like I like the less formal take on text.
It doesn't feel too much like that here on HN. But on reddit, I use less formal structure most of the time, and that feels natural to me.
But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.
This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.
But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.
That's incredibly presumptuous of you. That they're on their phone, that they had auto capitalization defaulted to on, that it's them who turned it off, that they didn't turn it off for whatever other reason (bugginess).
We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.
Of all fatuous nonsenses I've heard from design "geniuses" over the years, that might take the prize.
We don't look at spoken words, we listen to them. We add audible prosody (both pauses and intonation changes, in particular) to segment our speech. If we were to optimise our spoken language for lip-readers, we might very well choose to add some extra visible segmentation to compensate for the intonation being mostly undetectable.
You could validly claim that capital letters are superfluous given the presence of full stops (and I would disagree and we could debate that), but this argument that capital letters are bad because we don't speak "big sounds" is absurd.
As I remember there was no singular reason; not having to pinky-press shift was definitely a factor.
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
learning about Lojban and its punctuation probably also swayed me (it marks the start of the sentences with punctuation, which makes a lot more sense).
why do you think it's the world wide web
why do you think it's "pretentious" to be too exhausted to bother hitting the shift key
Prince song from the 1980s
Prince was pretentious AF
And I will be eternally thankful for his contribution to human culture
who friggen cares? why can the president diddle kids, but a random internet user has to have perfect grammar to be taken seriously?
the poster of this article could probably not care less if you "take them seriously"
i actually interact with ideas, not grammar. Especially in a fun personal blog post like this
I suspect that this is just something that happens naturally, for shorter-format messaging typing in sentence case probably offers no added readability and tends to get dropped over time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59004
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15 (from literally the first HN thread ever)
Also, it's perhaps somewhat hilarious to suggest that someone who has been chronically online for decades has to do anything to "fit in"
He writes as people who grew up on IRC and similar platforms tend to.