9 ms·

My partner didn't grow up "on the internet" like I did, and her ability to convey or perceive emotional cues that exist in the internet chat zeitgeist has been

by ehnto 5y ago

My partner didn't grow up "on the internet" like I did, and her ability to convey or perceive emotional cues that exist in the internet chat zeitgeist has been really interesting to me. Just one really small example that I think will be a good demonstration: Ending a sentence without a full stop is normal Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive. Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context... Some of you will be thinking "Uh, that's not true." Which it's almost definitely not true for everyone, but those emotions were ubiquitously conveyed in chat networks I was part of while I was growing up and there are dozens if not hundreds of uniquely text based emotional nuance that grew out of the need to be more expressive in chat/sms/text based messages. I'd love to see a study on it since I feel it may well explain a lot of miscommunications on the internet. If you assume the person you're talking to knows the 'rules' then you could be totally misunderstanding them. My partner finishes all her sentences with a full stop and on more than one occasion I've had to remind myself not to read into it, it's just that she's not 'from the internet'.

petters 5y ago
I have used the internet for 25 years and I learned that ending sentences with a period is/can be rude like two years ago. That surprised me a lot. But I never used chat a lot. I think on Usenet etc., full sentences were the norm.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  It's not rude. It's something a bunch of trolls just made up. It never happened organically.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    It is. I've had a co-worker once call it "a full stop of hate", and it clicked with me immediately, and then every person to which I mentioned this phrase immediately know what I meant. I believe it did grow organically. So, in the version I know and that seems to be Internet universal, it applies to IM messaging only. You don't start sentences in uppercase, and a full stop at the end of a message is interpreted as strong, negative emphasis. Similarly, ending an IM message with ellipsis is expressing disappointment. It can be productively used if it's obvious that the disappointment is not with your interlocutor (e.g. "these politicians..."). I personally know a (non-tech-savvy, so not a nerd bias) person who walked up to her coworker and very sternly asked she stops sending her messages ending with ellipsis, because it reads as if she constantly had some grudge.
    - stronglikedan 5y ago
      It's not. Only a very small percentage (even a fraction maybe) of the people I communicate with have ever even mentioned it. It's like a thing that a few people are trying to make a thing even though it's not really a thing.
      - ehnto 5y ago
        No one is saying it's a universal law, but it's definitely a thing that happens, and it's down to the individuals. I know people who if they use a full stop it's intentional and it's to make sure I realise they're dead serious. I also have my partner, who puts a full stop on everything because that's correct grammar. This is a decades old phenomenon by the way, no one is "trying to make it a thing". This isn't a twitter hot topic, it's just a nuance of online communication that's been around since at least IRC's hey-days. Some people read into it, some don't.
      - blooalien 5y ago
        There's a sad small group of people who just want any excuse to be instantly offended at anyone and everyone about any little thing, and they're always makin' up weird stuff like this (or buyin' into some other small sad person's made up thing). I've come to realize the only options are to ignore them or call them out on it, depending on the given situation.
  - jozvolskyef 5y ago
    From what I remember, sentiment analysis should reveal the cold and aggressive association to date at least to early 2000s ICQ communication in the Czech-speaking 7-15y/o cohort. The first time I can remember having to actively remind myself that people who grew up without internet use periods differently was about 2012.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      Even some of us who grew up with Internet still grew up in a time (and place) where some English teachers were "grammar nazis" and drilled punctuation, spelling, and grammar into us to the point of it becoming habit.
  - graynk 5y ago
    As Gretchen McCulloch put it: the message bubble _is_ the full stop. It did happen organically, and it _is_ an alarming event when someone who usually doesn't use full stops in chat suddenly decides to use one. Tom Scott made a video on that [0], which references Gretchen's book - Because Internet [1] [0] https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q [1] https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/ https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/
    - blooalien 5y ago
      I'm not really thrilled with that definition or line of thinking because it leads to a horrible habit that annoys me no end. The habit of using the sending of a single line of text in lieu of a "full stop" (period). This leads to thirty dingdingding notifications as the person sending seems to be incapable of putting a complete stream of thought into a proper paragraph with sentences in a single message. Just type out a complete thought before hitting "Send", please. I don't really want thirty related individual sentences arriving one after another separately.
      - graynk 5y ago
        > This leads to thirty dingdingding notifications I've disabled all notifications, save for blinking LED. So if I happen to look at my phone - I will see that there are some unread notifications, but other than that - no sounds, no vibrations, I don't need this distraction in my life. I've only enabled them for a couple of important contacts. Now I can even tell from whom the message is, just by the sound of the notification.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    It’s the equivalent of pretending that the old, widely-understood “OK” sign has something to do with white supremacy. The idea is to see if you can get people to believe it, and enjoy the panic that results.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      What a ridiculous leap of logic. This is just an observation I've made about how people as individuals interpret things on the internet, intuited from a long history of chatting online. I'm not implying there is some rulebook for internet etiquette. Some people read into it, some people don't. Is it really so hard to imagine that? Some people think the power of your handshake says all there is to know about you, some people think smiling without showing your teeth is rude. Humans are weird, it's just a nuance of text chat some people write and read and some people don't.
- petters 5y ago
  Can I make full stops between sentences? This is a serious question.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    It's really not that serious a topic but here's a serious answer anyway: you can have full stops anywhere you want, it's really up to the reader to not read into what you've written. Not everyone uses full stops that way and it mostly applies to chat anyway. I use full stops at the end of HN comments, but not at the end of instant messengers or chat rooms for example.
ljm 5y ago
Ok. Three characters to passively aggressively express how pissed off you are.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  ...
- hnbad 5y ago
  "Ok" is probably one of the best examples for how subtle changes in punctuation and spelling can convey extremely different sentiments with the same word. Language is at least as much about subtext as text, yet we only ever formally learn to pay attention to the latter outside fairly specific university level courses.
  - jdowner 5y ago
    k
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      ‘K.
      - iamacyborg 5y ago
        Still not as passive aggressive a response as a single thumbs up emoji
        kaibee 5y ago
        The fact that MS Teams includes this as one of the only 5 reactions you can send to a message is... frustrating. It isn't the only issue with Teams by far but, please, MS, Discord already did it right.
        GrinningFool 5y ago
        Wait, what makes that passive aggressive?
ck425 5y ago
I think this is fundamental to human linguistics in general, not unique to written text. People communicate differently in different places, even when speaking the same language or just using non-verbal queues. The only real difference on the internet is that it's less clear which culture you're in or if you're even in a different culture. Two examples from real life: There was an article on here recently about why Russians don't smile. In their culture a smile signals laughter not happiness/friendliness. So when you smile at a stranger there to be friendly they think you're laughing at them. Swearing. I come from Scotland where the words fuck and cunt are considered normal language by many (not all). If a friend told me an unlikely story I would exclaim 'fuck off' in disbelief and they would understand that I was disbelieving/amused. But If I reacted that way to most Americans I know they'd take offence thinking I was angry at them. The way that emojis and grammar are used differently across the internet is fundamental to how human groups create their own linguistic protocols. Trying to use emojis less rather than just spreading understanding of differences is a mistake in my opinion.
- blooalien 5y ago
  What you say here exactly illustrates why if one does not immediately grasp the intent of someone's words, they should not take immediate offense, but rather "dig deeper". Don't understand why someone said something they said the way they said it? Ask them. Easiest way to clarify things is to request more information to work with. :)
absove 5y ago
Ending your sentence with an ellipsis feels so passive agressive to me for some reason. Then occasionally I'll get a mail from someone who seems to use them as their default punctuation... For every single sentence... I have no idea why they do it... Do they think it gives them character...?
- treesknees 5y ago
  Older pre-internet generations used the ellipsis to separate thoughts or to insert a pause, whereas today we typically do this with a line break and possibly an entirely separate message. The result is sometimes you end up talking to older folks who come across as annoyed or rude and it's really not the case. I have a few coworkers who do this and I have to remind myself that it's just how they type. I speak to them in person so I know it's not that they're mad at me or something like that. Not the original article I read on the topic but similar: https://www.purewow.com/tech/why-do-boomers-use-ellipses https://www.purewow.com/tech/why-do-boomers-use-ellipses To be honest, I actually would prefer the ellipses over some other conversations. I have coworkers who have to type out every single thought as a separate message. E.g. I received a similar set of messages below, that should have been a single message and not 5. If they had just paused for 3 seconds to think about their speech, it would have been a single message. Instead I get a notification icon bouncing a dozen times and firing off alerts like it's an emergency. person_a: oh did you see the sign? person_a: it was in the conference room person_a: says something about turning off the lights person_a: after meetings though person_a: i thought the lights turned off automatically? person_a: TIL!
codingdave 5y ago
It seems like we rapidly went from "Please use proper grammar online" -> "OK, proper grammar isn't required" -> "Proper grammar is rude." We now have ended up at a point where there are different grammatic rules online vs. IRL, and not everybody agrees on them. That is OK, we don't all agree on the Oxford comma either. But I find it absurd for people to judge the grammatic style of others online - we don't even all speak the same language, how can we possibly all agree on proper punctuation?
- blooalien 5y ago
  > That is OK, we don't all agree on the Oxford comma either. But I find it absurd for people to judge the grammatic style of others online - we don't even all speak the same language, how can we possibly all agree on proper punctuation? Oxford comma master race FTW! Seriously though, you're absolutely correct. The only valid time I can think of where one should probably consistently expect to have their grammar, punctuation, or spelling judged "harshly" should be in places/situation where those things are and have always been considered important. The writing profession springs instantly to mind, but other examples might be professional correspondence, documentation, scientific publication, etc. Places where language tends to be more "formalized".
blooalien 5y ago
> Ending a sentence without a full stop is normal > Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive. > Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context... It has to be considered that some of us who grew up in a world where "proper" punctuation and grammar were drilled into us in school as "important skills" may find these things to be natural and reflexive. Even folks like myself, lucky enough to have grown up with Internet access since before it was even called "Internet" often had the English teacher in school who would severely dock your grade on bad punctuation, grammar, or spelling. This of course has directly (and probably permanently) affected how we write in all aspects of written communication, online or otherwise.

by ehnto 5y ago

petters 5y ago

I have used the internet for 25 years and I learned that ending sentences with a period is/can be rude like two years ago. That surprised me a lot. But I never used chat a lot. I think on Usenet etc., full sentences were the norm.

moron4hire 5y ago
It's not rude. It's something a bunch of trolls just made up. It never happened organically.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  It is. I've had a co-worker once call it "a full stop of hate", and it clicked with me immediately, and then every person to which I mentioned this phrase immediately know what I meant. I believe it did grow organically. So, in the version I know and that seems to be Internet universal, it applies to IM messaging only. You don't start sentences in uppercase, and a full stop at the end of a message is interpreted as strong, negative emphasis. Similarly, ending an IM message with ellipsis is expressing disappointment. It can be productively used if it's obvious that the disappointment is not with your interlocutor (e.g. "these politicians..."). I personally know a (non-tech-savvy, so not a nerd bias) person who walked up to her coworker and very sternly asked she stops sending her messages ending with ellipsis, because it reads as if she constantly had some grudge.
  - stronglikedan 5y ago
    It's not. Only a very small percentage (even a fraction maybe) of the people I communicate with have ever even mentioned it. It's like a thing that a few people are trying to make a thing even though it's not really a thing.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      No one is saying it's a universal law, but it's definitely a thing that happens, and it's down to the individuals. I know people who if they use a full stop it's intentional and it's to make sure I realise they're dead serious. I also have my partner, who puts a full stop on everything because that's correct grammar. This is a decades old phenomenon by the way, no one is "trying to make it a thing". This isn't a twitter hot topic, it's just a nuance of online communication that's been around since at least IRC's hey-days. Some people read into it, some don't.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      There's a sad small group of people who just want any excuse to be instantly offended at anyone and everyone about any little thing, and they're always makin' up weird stuff like this (or buyin' into some other small sad person's made up thing). I've come to realize the only options are to ignore them or call them out on it, depending on the given situation.
- jozvolskyef 5y ago
  From what I remember, sentiment analysis should reveal the cold and aggressive association to date at least to early 2000s ICQ communication in the Czech-speaking 7-15y/o cohort. The first time I can remember having to actively remind myself that people who grew up without internet use periods differently was about 2012.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    Even some of us who grew up with Internet still grew up in a time (and place) where some English teachers were "grammar nazis" and drilled punctuation, spelling, and grammar into us to the point of it becoming habit.
- graynk 5y ago
  As Gretchen McCulloch put it: the message bubble _is_ the full stop. It did happen organically, and it _is_ an alarming event when someone who usually doesn't use full stops in chat suddenly decides to use one. Tom Scott made a video on that [0], which references Gretchen's book - Because Internet [1] [0] https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q [1] https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/ https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/
  - blooalien 5y ago
    I'm not really thrilled with that definition or line of thinking because it leads to a horrible habit that annoys me no end. The habit of using the sending of a single line of text in lieu of a "full stop" (period). This leads to thirty dingdingding notifications as the person sending seems to be incapable of putting a complete stream of thought into a proper paragraph with sentences in a single message. Just type out a complete thought before hitting "Send", please. I don't really want thirty related individual sentences arriving one after another separately.
    - graynk 5y ago
      > This leads to thirty dingdingding notifications I've disabled all notifications, save for blinking LED. So if I happen to look at my phone - I will see that there are some unread notifications, but other than that - no sounds, no vibrations, I don't need this distraction in my life. I've only enabled them for a couple of important contacts. Now I can even tell from whom the message is, just by the sound of the notification.
- leephillips 5y ago
  It’s the equivalent of pretending that the old, widely-understood “OK” sign has something to do with white supremacy. The idea is to see if you can get people to believe it, and enjoy the panic that results.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    What a ridiculous leap of logic. This is just an observation I've made about how people as individuals interpret things on the internet, intuited from a long history of chatting online. I'm not implying there is some rulebook for internet etiquette. Some people read into it, some people don't. Is it really so hard to imagine that? Some people think the power of your handshake says all there is to know about you, some people think smiling without showing your teeth is rude. Humans are weird, it's just a nuance of text chat some people write and read and some people don't.
petters 5y ago
Can I make full stops between sentences? This is a serious question.
- ehnto 5y ago
  It's really not that serious a topic but here's a serious answer anyway: you can have full stops anywhere you want, it's really up to the reader to not read into what you've written. Not everyone uses full stops that way and it mostly applies to chat anyway. I use full stops at the end of HN comments, but not at the end of instant messengers or chat rooms for example.

ljm 5y ago

Ok. Three characters to passively aggressively express how pissed off you are.

bennyp101 5y ago
...
hnbad 5y ago
"Ok" is probably one of the best examples for how subtle changes in punctuation and spelling can convey extremely different sentiments with the same word. Language is at least as much about subtext as text, yet we only ever formally learn to pay attention to the latter outside fairly specific university level courses.
- jdowner 5y ago
  k
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    ‘K.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Still not as passive aggressive a response as a single thumbs up emoji
      - kaibee 5y ago
        The fact that MS Teams includes this as one of the only 5 reactions you can send to a message is... frustrating. It isn't the only issue with Teams by far but, please, MS, Discord already did it right.
      - GrinningFool 5y ago
        Wait, what makes that passive aggressive?

ck425 5y ago

I think this is fundamental to human linguistics in general, not unique to written text. People communicate differently in different places, even when speaking the same language or just using non-verbal queues. The only real difference on the internet is that it's less clear which culture you're in or if you're even in a different culture. Two examples from real life: There was an article on here recently about why Russians don't smile. In their culture a smile signals laughter not happiness/friendliness. So when you smile at a stranger there to be friendly they think you're laughing at them. Swearing. I come from Scotland where the words fuck and cunt are considered normal language by many (not all). If a friend told me an unlikely story I would exclaim 'fuck off' in disbelief and they would understand that I was disbelieving/amused. But If I reacted that way to most Americans I know they'd take offence thinking I was angry at them. The way that emojis and grammar are used differently across the internet is fundamental to how human groups create their own linguistic protocols. Trying to use emojis less rather than just spreading understanding of differences is a mistake in my opinion.

blooalien 5y ago
What you say here exactly illustrates why if one does not immediately grasp the intent of someone's words, they should not take immediate offense, but rather "dig deeper". Don't understand why someone said something they said the way they said it? Ask them. Easiest way to clarify things is to request more information to work with. :)

absove 5y ago

Ending your sentence with an ellipsis feels so passive agressive to me for some reason. Then occasionally I'll get a mail from someone who seems to use them as their default punctuation... For every single sentence... I have no idea why they do it... Do they think it gives them character...?

treesknees 5y ago
Older pre-internet generations used the ellipsis to separate thoughts or to insert a pause, whereas today we typically do this with a line break and possibly an entirely separate message. The result is sometimes you end up talking to older folks who come across as annoyed or rude and it's really not the case. I have a few coworkers who do this and I have to remind myself that it's just how they type. I speak to them in person so I know it's not that they're mad at me or something like that. Not the original article I read on the topic but similar: https://www.purewow.com/tech/why-do-boomers-use-ellipses https://www.purewow.com/tech/why-do-boomers-use-ellipses To be honest, I actually would prefer the ellipses over some other conversations. I have coworkers who have to type out every single thought as a separate message. E.g. I received a similar set of messages below, that should have been a single message and not 5. If they had just paused for 3 seconds to think about their speech, it would have been a single message. Instead I get a notification icon bouncing a dozen times and firing off alerts like it's an emergency. person_a: oh did you see the sign? person_a: it was in the conference room person_a: says something about turning off the lights person_a: after meetings though person_a: i thought the lights turned off automatically? person_a: TIL!

codingdave 5y ago

It seems like we rapidly went from "Please use proper grammar online" -> "OK, proper grammar isn't required" -> "Proper grammar is rude." We now have ended up at a point where there are different grammatic rules online vs. IRL, and not everybody agrees on them. That is OK, we don't all agree on the Oxford comma either. But I find it absurd for people to judge the grammatic style of others online - we don't even all speak the same language, how can we possibly all agree on proper punctuation?

blooalien 5y ago
> That is OK, we don't all agree on the Oxford comma either. But I find it absurd for people to judge the grammatic style of others online - we don't even all speak the same language, how can we possibly all agree on proper punctuation? Oxford comma master race FTW! Seriously though, you're absolutely correct. The only valid time I can think of where one should probably consistently expect to have their grammar, punctuation, or spelling judged "harshly" should be in places/situation where those things are and have always been considered important. The writing profession springs instantly to mind, but other examples might be professional correspondence, documentation, scientific publication, etc. Places where language tends to be more "formalized".

blooalien 5y ago

> Ending a sentence without a full stop is normal > Ending a sentence with a full stop feels cold or aggressive. > Ending a sentence with an ellipsis has a negative connotation depending on the context... It has to be considered that some of us who grew up in a world where "proper" punctuation and grammar were drilled into us in school as "important skills" may find these things to be natural and reflexive. Even folks like myself, lucky enough to have grown up with Internet access since before it was even called "Internet" often had the English teacher in school who would severely dock your grade on bad punctuation, grammar, or spelling. This of course has directly (and probably permanently) affected how we write in all aspects of written communication, online or otherwise.