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Comment by SilverSlash | Hacker News Reader

I think Sam Altman popularized it with his tweets during the height of OpenAI, GPT popularity ~2023. Or maybe it was already trending by then but at least for me he was the first among prominent people to be doing it.

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Smartphones forced automated capitalization on us, just look at how chatlogs have changed over time. I'd suggest no-capitalization is on the downtrend, but sticks out more because everything is automatically capitalized now.

there are times i will explicitly fight that when i am typing something on a phone and want the subtle mode shift of all lowercase, it's kind of hilarious to watch myself doing that

the lack of capitalization (and occasional omission of punctuation) was already a big thing on tumblr / twitter 10 years ago, especially in some anime and LGBT-adjacent spaces. I don't think jyn got it from Sam Altman, and I don't think he had that big a role in popularizing it.

It was a thing 25 years ago already in SMS and IM.

Before smartphones, it seems to have been the standard for just about every form of instant messaging. Well, morse has no capitalization and telex would typically have been uppercase-only too, but I think we can still count those?

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.

“Sam Altman popularized written prose without capitalization by the way he posted to twitter 3 years ago” is one of the wildest takes I have ever heard

imho it was definitely popular before and altman adopted it to fit in with the online crowd

sama writing like that is not a new thing:

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.

oh okay, I shouldn't have judged that so haphazardly. thx for the references

The author indeed seems to start using the same style in 2023: https://jyn.dev/tags/ideas/

This has been my perception of the timeline as well.

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