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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 t
by RagnarD 10mo ago
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?
- SilverSlash 10mo agoI 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.
- Zolomon 10mo agoThis has been my perception of the timeline as well.
- bluedel 10mo agothe 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.
- int_19h 10mo agoIt was a thing 25 years ago already in SMS and IM.
- monerozcash 10mo agoBefore 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.
- monerozcash 10mo agoSmartphones 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.
- egypturnash 10mo agothere 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
- thawawaycold 10mo agoimho it was definitely popular before and altman adopted it to fit in with the online crowd
- monerozcash 10mo agosama writing like that is not a new thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15 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.
- thawawaycold 10mo agooh okay, I shouldn't have judged that so haphazardly. thx for the references
- mock-possum 10mo ago“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
- bnrdr 10mo agoThe author indeed seems to start using the same style in 2023: https://jyn.dev/tags/ideas/ https://jyn.dev/tags/ideas/
- antoniojtorres 10mo agorelax
- fruitworks 10mo agoNo
- tbossanova 10mo agoNothing compares 2 U Prince song from the 1980s Prince was pretentious AF And I will be eternally thankful for his contribution to human culture
- rzzzt 10mo agodon't do it
- egypturnash 10mo agowhen you wanna come
- haddr 10mo agoIt probably starts with the habit of writing words without using the Shift key or diacritics. Just to be quick. At least, that’s how I’ve noticed this behavior in myself.
- lloeki 10mo agoI've seen - and used - such nocaps patterns as far back as the 90's on IRC. As I remember there was no singular reason; not having to pinky-press shift was definitely a factor.
- mnsc 10mo agoI read the whole thing without seeing it. But I also fail to see how you marry "pretentious" with not wanting to be taken seriously. So maybe it's me.
- disruptiveink 10mo agoIf you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness? You're going into extra trouble to signify you're part of a clique, while feigning "laid-backness" and "i dont even care bro". 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.
- mnsc 10mo agoI think you are reading to much into kids trying to break norms and trying to be "part of a clique". It's not pretentiosness, it's part of finding yourself. They are also actively trying to get you to not read them because you are old and think they "are not serious" so mission accomplished I guess. And time will tell if these kids will invent something you have to respect. (Spoiler alert, we did and they will to)
- bluedel 10mo agoyou're right, blog articles should be entirely devoid of stylistic choices and signifiers.
- nottorp 10mo agoThis is HN, you need to use sarcasm tags.
- einr 10mo agoI turn off autocapitalization on my phone so I can be consistent with my computers where it IS more effort to use capitalization. I also believe quite dogmatically that computers should not try to be smarter than me, I can press the buttons I intend to press, including the shift key on a phone keyboard. 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- andai 10mo agoMy spider sense tells me it has to do with lesbian anarchism, as explained in Douglas Coupland's jPod.
- pluralmonad 10mo agoProbably unintentional, but the word spider stacked on anarchism definitely made me try to understand what lesbian arachnids had to do with anything.
- egypturnash 10mo agolesbian arachnids keep the internet running why do you think it's the world wide web
- minajevs 10mo agoin 1925 https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_letters_lower_case_only.html https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...
- cenamus 10mo ago> it is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either 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.
- pfortuny 10mo agoYes, let us write without spaces or punctuation, that is what we used to do always!
- omnicognate 10mo ago> as is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either. 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.
- rvz 10mo agoMost people usually see common scammers writing emails with no capitalization to scam their victims, especially if it is not their first language. 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.
- everybodyknows 10mo agoCapitalization aids the eye in its search for sentence breaks; it makes reading easier.
- AndyMcConachie 10mo agoHe's just having fun.
- purplesyringa 10mo agoIt's "they" (https://github.com/jyn514 https://github.com/jyn514)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- einr 10mo agoThis probably has to do with what kind of Internet milieu you grew up in because to me — grown up on IRC and certain late 90s/early 00s web forums — lowercase everything signals a sort of chill, easygoing humility while properly capsing in a casual setting like chat can feel overbearing, pretentious and self-important.
- thornewolf 10mo agoI started typing in no caps in most conversation around 2013-2016, when I first started playing League of Legends and using Discord. Other people from this same age bracket as me have similar experiences (if they were "chronically" online) and similar behavior patterns. It's not pretentious imo.
- mexicocitinluez 10mo agosame. 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.
- lkramer 10mo agoInteresting, I think for the older generation me included at the age of 45, it can be jarring to miss the visual marker of the capital letter in the beginning of a sentence. I have been online for 30 years and have certainly written my fair share of poor grammar, missing punctuation and probably missing capitalisation as well. I think the surprise comes from this being an article on the internet and seems like a design choice.
- skydhash 10mo agoI usually speed read and the shape of the words helps. Having no capitalization feels like reading a very long sentence and slow down my speed a lot.
- surajrmal 10mo ago15 years ago, it was incredibly common to see folks texting things like "c u ltr". It made its way into instant messaging (where folks had a keyboard), but slowly disappeared once everyone had smartphones that autocorrected everything. I don't think it's strange to see that people prefer it stylistically. Text has very little in the way of showing emotions or intentions, so everything you can do to alter that is something to be used. People want to be less formal sometimes.
- ipsento606 10mo ago
- cons0le 10mo agobruh, we're never making it to space as a society if you can't stop getting hung up on pointless shit like this 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
- feurio 10mo agoLOOKITCOULDBEWORSESOJUSTCHILLANDTRYNOTTOWORRYABOUTITTOOMUCHOK
- School-Cotton 10mo agoIt is something people born 2000 and later do to try to sound cool and detached. It's really no more complicated than that.
- ycombinete 10mo agoSo basically the text version of the gen z stare.
- WorldMaker 10mo agoIn the 1990s, this was called "whispering" and had pockets in BBS/CompuServe/AOL/usenet discussions. Also why I still think of all caps as shouting and can't be convinced otherwise (looking at Microsoft and a few other companies and their designers that keep going through phases insisting all caps is a useful flavor in UI design and not shouting for attention that they don't need).
- bnrdr 10mo agoA lot of the comments here are bashing you, but I just wanted to say that I feel the same. I find it jarring and off putting.
- hiccuphippo 10mo agoIt's like xml vs html, some people really like their markup to have explicit closing/self-closed tags, others don't really care and expect the user-agent (the reader) to parse them correctly. Same with semicolons in Javascript.
- stronglikedan 10mo agocapitalization has never been a requirement - it's not even part of grammar nor is punctuation
- egypturnash 10mo agopretty sure i saw people doing it back in the eighties on local dialup bbs's why do you think it's "pretentious" to be too exhausted to bother hitting the shift key
- redherring22 10mo agoIt may not be pretentious, but pretending that an extra 1-2 keystrokes per sentence is "exhausting" is pretty sad.
- attila-lendvai 10mo agoi started typing no caps at least a decade ago (and i'm 50). the reason was mostly that when i edited a sentence i had to mess around with caps, plus speed and pinky strain. 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).