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First thing that came to mind when I saw nt was “no text” shorthand (or no topic). Can’t quite pick where but suspect from IRC a long time ago.
by yardstick 5y ago
First thing that came to mind when I saw nt was “no text” shorthand (or no topic). Can’t quite pick where but suspect from IRC a long time ago.
- MaxLeiter 5y agoI cant imagine a huge use case on IRC, but ive definitely seen nt used in old usenet posts
- kelnos 5y agoThat was my first assumption as well. I'd seen it used (and used it myself) in usenet posts and email where the message was short enough to fit in the subject line, so you'd just append "[nt]" or something similar to end to note or confirm that there was nothing to read in the body.
- pram 5y ago“nt” is, in fact, how you make a classic low effort shitpost. You make the thread title something provocative, and then the content is just nt.
- IggleSniggle 5y agoAt my (very small) college there was an email system where you could send emails to the entire campus. It pretty quickly turned into something that felt very similar to an online forum. It was conventional to use N/T at the end of subject lines for "No Text" when the subject line was all you needed to convey your message. Email was checked with enough frequency that it was commonly used for what we use SMS / text-messaging for today. You didn't really expect people to be near their landline phone, but you could connect with most students on campus pretty easily/rapidly with the e-mail system. This is an era before there was cell-phone service on campus, but cell phones were still very rare anyway.