8 ms·
Tangent: what is the appeal of the “no capitalization” writing style? I never know what message the author is intending to convey when I see all lower case. N
by cj 8mo ago
Tangent: what is the appeal of the “no capitalization” writing style? I never know what message the author is intending to convey when I see all lower case.
Normally I can ignore it, but the font on this blog makes it hard to distinguish where sentences start and end (the period is very small and faint).
- atherton33 8mo agoTangent to the tangent! I've started using it professionally because it signals "I wrote this by hand, not AI, so you can safely pay attention to it." Even though in the past I never would have done it. In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out.
- imsohotness 8mo agoTrivial to get AI to write in all lowercase, though.
- atherton33 8mo agoYes, the strategy depends on lack of effort from other senders, even trivial effort
- p1anecrazy 8mo ago> In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out. Do you mean like Teams AI autocomplete or people purposefully copying AI-generated messages into chats?
- atherton33 8mo agoThe latter. Using chatgpt to write their chat messages usually. Emoji, arbitrary bold and italics, bullets, etc.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- sdwr 8mo agoInformal, casual, friendly
- layer8 8mo agoIt comes across as unfriendly to me.
- DougN7 8mo agoI view it as lazy or uneducated.
- MarsIronPI 8mo agoIn a blog post it makes the author sound foreign at best and uneducated at worst, with sloppy being halfway in between.
- imsohotness 8mo agoI've seen this before, I know Sam Altman does it (or used to do it). That was a couple years ago. Hope it doesn't become a trend.
- the_af 8mo agoIt's already a trend. It's been for at least a decade. I'm surprised people here never noticed it...
- layer8 8mo agoUnfortunately it has become quite common on HN already. It comes from people growing up on smartphone chats where the kids apparently don’t care to press Shift.
- Uehreka 8mo agoWhat’s weird though is that modern OSes often auto-capitalize the first letter of a sentence, so it actually takes more effort to deliberately type in all-lowercase.
- rileymichael 8mo agosimple toggle to disable it permanently my reasoning is that i don’t want identifiable markers for what device im writing from. so all auto-* (capitalization, correct, etc.) features are disabled so that i have raw input
- hluska 8mo agoBeing part of the minority that disables those things (and then admitting to it in public) provides a lot more analytical signal than you’re aware of. That’s a remarkably poor reason to disrespect your readers.
- rileymichael 8mo agoi don't care about the 'analytical signal'. the purpose is people can't tell if im writing a (discord, slack, etc.) message from my phone or laptop or desktop, and it works for that
- Octoth0rpe 8mo agoFirst time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that trends. I can think of at least one previous case where internet writing style overturned centuries of english conventions: we used to put a double space after each period. The web killed that due to double spaces requiring extra work ( , etc), and at this point I think word processors now follow the convention. It's always useful to check oneself and know that languages are constantly evolving, and that's A Good Thing.
- the_af 8mo ago> First time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that trends. It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It dates back to at least a decade. It's mostly used to signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for punctuation or syntax. It already trends among a certain generation of people. I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading of mid/long form text is unwelcome.
- Octoth0rpe 8mo ago> I'm surprised you never noticed it Probably due to social circles/age. > I hate it, needless to say. It certainly invokes a innate sense of wrongness to me, but I encourage you (and myself) to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.
- jonahx 8mo ago> to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today. I think "accept everything new" is as closed-minded as staunchly fighting every change. The genuinely open-minded thing to do is accept that some changes are for the worse, some for the better, think critically about the "why", and pick your battles.
- hluska 8mo ago
- zenmac 8mo agoeasier to type without using the shift key, and in pg you can just use LIKE not ILIKE to find the word.
- the_af 8mo agoText is meant primarily to be read rather than written.
- yesbabyyes 8mo agoSure, but preeminently for effortless querying in PostgreSQL.
- micromacrofoot 8mo agoinformality, humanity — we're in an age where we can't assume anything is written by a person anymore
- nprz 8mo agoCasual, informal, friendly, hip, young, etc. Can make sense on twitter to convey personality, but an entire blog post written in lower case is a bit much.
- KronisLV 8mo agoI used not to capitalize "I" in my own writing, because it seemed a bit silly to do that, even though making it more distinct visually seems okay now, some years later. At the same time, in my language (Latvian) you/yours should also get capitalized in polite text corespondence, like formal letters and such. Odd.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoMakes you reduce your guard to clearly AI generated content.
- 1dom 8mo agoI really dislike it too. I think it might be adults ignoring established grammar rules to make a statement about how they identify a part of a group of AI evangelists. Kind of like how teenagers do nonsensical things like where thick heavy clothing regardless of the weather to indicate how much of a badass them and their other badass coat wearing friends are. To normal humans, they look ridiculous, but they think they're cool and they're not harming anyone so I just leave them to it.
- webdood90 8mo agocan't imagine getting this riled up over lowercase text. some serious fist-shaking-at-clouds energy. it's meant to convey a casual, laid back tone - it's not that big of a deal.
- verdverm 8mo agoIt's hard to find sentence breaks, it is actually about readability and accessibility
- mejutoco 8mo agoIronically, this sentence is called a comma splice or run-on sentence. A period or semicolon would be correct. I agree with the sentiment too, or maybe I am getting old :P
- verdverm 8mo agoI don't think it's about getting old, it's about expecting clear and parsable communication Some people are being lazy, they will get less attention, ideally
- outime 8mo agoI also agree it sucks, and I don't see a problem pointing it out.
- calepayson 8mo ago
- speak_plainly 8mo agoSomeone at some point styled themselves as a new E.E. Cummings, and somehow this became a style. The article features inconsistent capitalization for proper names alongside capitalized initialisms, proving there is some recognition of the utility of capitalization. Ultimately, the author forces an unnecessary cognitive burden on the reader by removing a simple form of navigation; in that regard, it feels like a form of disrespect.
- randusername 8mo agoI think I like it generally, maybe not in this specific case, but I'm not sure why it appeals to me. Over the last 5 years or so I've been working on making my writing more direct. Less "five dollar words" and complex sentences. My natural voice is... prolix. But great prose from great authors can compress a lot of meaning without any of that stuff. They can show restraint. If I had to guess, no capitalization looks visually unassuming and off-the-cuff. Humble. Maybe it deflects some criticism, maybe it just helps with visual recognition that a piece of writing is more of a text message than an essay, so don't think too hard about it.
- hluska 8mo agoIncidentally, prolix is a fifty dollar word. You did successfully avoid five dollar words, but you didn’t go the right direction. It’s okay to say ‘this was too long’. Prolix???
- surrTurr 8mo agoas perfect text became an indicator for AI generated content, people intentionally make mistakes (capitalization) to make their text appear more human; and its also faster
- chasd00 8mo agoUsing a semicolon like that also identifies your text as AI generated. Close but no cigar.
- yomismoaqui 8mo agoFor me is like a someone is trying to show me something using form instead of content.
- moss_dog 8mo agoI'm generally of the opinion that capitalization is not necessary in many cases, such as at the start of sentences. That's what punctuation is for :)
- game_the0ry 8mo agoIts a gen z trend. My nephews do the same. We are old.
- bonesss 8mo agoIt’s older than that - lots of my boomer bosses did it to seem cool over email in the late 90s. I viscerally remember starting my day with my inbox saying “cum c me”… I know what you’re trying to do, bro, but damn. We are young and old all at the same time.
- game_the0ry 8mo agoInteresting. I am a millennial and I never did this, nor did I have any friends that did. But I know m nephews deliberately turn off the auto edit in there iphones.
- wredcoll 8mo agoTurning off the auto correct is really interesting, I wonder if there's any kind of study on that
- Avicebron 8mo agoI remember hearing that people used it as a way to signal that they were too busy, too on the go, too important to use proper punctuation..it was an obnoxious c suite trend as long as I can remember. Like you're always trying to signal that you were doing all of your comms from your cell phone between meetings/travelling. Given this article's tone and content I would say that what the author is trying to emulate or convey , maybe subconciously.
- verdverm 8mo agoWe are not old, there is a reason the generation is said (in stats and polls) to be less professional than prior generations when entering the workforce
- game_the0ry 8mo ago
- cma 8mo agoAltman/Brockman did it a lot and it became popular. I don't remember if it is true or "Malcolm Gladwell" true, but in various stories all NBA players started wearing baggy shorts because Michael Jordan did for one reason or another, like wearing his college shorts under them.
- defgeneric 8mo agoYou mention the technical aspect (readability) and others have suggested the aesthetic, but you could also look at it as a form of rhetoric. I'm not sure it's really effective because it sort of grates on the ear for anyone over 35, but maybe there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI sloptext. Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations), while for older generations it was almost always associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution of the Microsoft logo, for example).
- yunohn 8mo ago> but maybe there's a point in distinguishing itself from AI sloptext Surprisingly, I have seen lower case AI slop - like anything else, can be prompted and made to happen!
- eggy 8mo agonobody shouts in lowercase—it whispers its way into being, a small insurgency against The Proper Way To Speak ; ) -- inspired by e.e. cummings!
- wredcoll 8mo ago> Additionally, The Chicago Manual of Style, which prescribes favoring non-standard capitalization of names in accordance with the bearer's strongly stated preference, notes "E. E. Cummings can be safely capitalized; it was one of his publishers, not he himself, who lowercased his name."[65]
- pfortuny 8mo agoBut then Clawd gets capitalized...
- slfnflctd 8mo agoI was using all lowercase as my default for internet comments (and personal journal entries) for at least a solid decade, starting from some point in the 90s. I saw it as a way to take a step back from being pretentious. I eventually ran into so much resistance and hate about it that I decided conforming to writing in a way that people aren't actively hostile to was a better approach to communicating my thoughts than getting hung up on an aesthetic choice. Having started out as a counterculture type, that will always be in my blood, but I've relearned this lesson over and over again in many situations-- it's usually better to focus on clear communication and getting things done unless your non-standard format is a critical part of whatever message you're trying to send at the moment.
- bayindirh 8mo agoI have chatted with someone else, and they pointed me to a blog post (will attach if I can find). The general idea is deliberately doing something triggering some people and if the person you're interacting with is triggered by what you're doing, they are not worthy of your attention because of their ignorance to see what you're doing beyond the form of the thing you're doing. While I respect the idea, I find it somewhat flawed, to be honest. Edit: Found it! Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028036 Blog post in question: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html
- toastal 8mo agoIt’s weird being literate enough in a language now without a bicameral script (or spaces). When I was younger, I thought this stuff wasn’t so important, but then when you learn a new language, you are trying to figure out what a “robert” is, to then be told “oh, it’s just a name”—which is obvious if know standard `en-Latn` conventions.
- AlienRobot 8mo ago>I never know what message the author is intending to convey when I see all lower case. JUST IMAGINE A FACEBOOK POST THAT IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS AND THEN INVERT THAT IMAGINATION.
- PKop 8mo ago[flagged]
- projectazorian 8mo agoTypeface issues aside all-lowercase is about having a more conversational register, intended to indicate a chilled-out and informal vibe. It does read as a little out of place in a serious post like the OP though.
- verdverm 8mo agothe vibe I get is someone who can't put in the effort to make my job reading easier (i.e. hard to find sentence breaks) It is on a human seeing level, harder to parse. If they don't want to use proper grammar and punctuation, it reflects on their seriousness and how serious I should take their writing (not at all because I'm not going to read difficult to parse text) The same goes for choosing bad fonts or colors that don't contrast enough
- cjauvin 8mo agoFor "something that is published" (which includes a comment like this) I clearly dislike it too, but for chatting / texting, I realize that I often use it more than my interlocutors, and I'm not sure why. There's a part of lazyness I guess, but also a vague sense of "conveying the impression of a never ending stream of communication", which is closer in my mind to the essence of the chat medium. In French, there is also the additional layer of "using the accents or not".
- MarsIronPI 8mo agoI always start my texts with a capital, but I don't put periods at the ends of my sentences when texting that way I can continue the same sentence in the next message if necessary And if I need to start a new sentence I start that message with a capital.
- louiereederson 8mo agoi don't know this author but ian bremner does this. it's as if he's conveying what he believes are serious and important thoughts in an unserious and casual way, to make it appear as if the thoughts - which again he probably thinks are brilliant - just come quickly and naturally. it comes across as performative though again not making claims against this author. and yes i am not using sentence case here, but this is not an essay.
- chasd00 8mo ago> just come quickly and naturally. Ironically, it would take a lot of effort for me to type without capitalization and also undo capitalization auto-correct. It would not come quickly nor naturally.
- verdverm 8mo agoThey may not type it that way, you can select all and lower case all with a few keystrokes in vim. Should this be the case, it lends itself more to the performative nature of the style over clear communication
- fph 8mo agoVim? It's more likely they have "type everything in lowercase" in Claude.md.
- jasondigitized 8mo agoIt's the equivalent of TikTokers who provide hot takes while eating food. It's done to feign being superior and aloof, e.g. "This is so easy to understand and so beneath my intellect, I can tell you about it will I eat these crackers"
- maxkfranz 8mo agoGeorge: To cover my nervousness I started eating an apple, because I think if they hear you chewing on the other end of the phone, it makes you sound casual. Jerry: Yeah, like a farm boy.
- blitzar 8mo agoIts the black turtle neck of 2026
- Pr0ject217 8mo agoPerhaps it's marketing to attract those who wear sweatpants to school. The author's other posts are written normally.
- kypro 8mo agoNo idea, but it's something I've been thinking about ever since my parents dug out an old school journal from when I was younger and they were laughing about the stuff I wrote in there... The first 50 pages or so were full of laughably simple phrases like, "played with sand" or "i like computers". Later in the journal my writing "improved". Instead I might write, "Today I played in the sandpit with my friends." I vaguely remember my teacher telling me I needed to write in full sentences, uses the correct punctuation, etc. That was the point of these journals – to learn how to write. But looking back on it I started to question if I actually learnt how to write? Or did I just learn how to write how I was expected to? If I understood what I was saying from the start and I was communicating that message in fewer words and with less complexity, was it wrong? And if so wrong in what sense? You see this with kids generally when they learn to speak. Kids speak very directly. They first learn how to functionally communicate, then how to communicate in a socially acceptable way, using more more words. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think the fact you can drop capitals and communicate just as effectively is kinda interesting. If it wasn't for how we are taught to write, perhaps the better question to ask here is why there are even two types of every letter?
- chzblck 8mo agoMy old CEO - ex sun/greenplum/pivotal swore that sending an email in lowercase forced the other person to read the whole message and not skim.
- paulgerhardt 8mo agoI’ve seen it a lot in ‘90’s hacker / net adjacent cultures. It always reads as gen-x/elderly tech millennial to me - specifically post 1993 net culture but prior to mass adoption of autocorrect. It was the norm on irc/icq/aim chats but also, later, as the house style for blogs like hackaday. Now I read it as one would an hear an accent (such as a New England Maritime accent) that low-key signifies this person has been around the block. Even more recently is a minor signifier that this text was less likely generated by llm.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- rokhayakebe 8mo agoit's a billionaire thing. look at the Epstein email threads. too lazy to check +typos allovr .
- jedberg 8mo agoMy assumption was that it's a way to convey it was written by a human because it would be hard to get an AI to write in all lowercase (which it actually isn't).
- magneticnorth 8mo agoI was just this morning reading one of those navel-gazing moltbook posts where the agent describes their "soul.md", and one of its few instructions was all-lowercase (which it was doing). That early sentence "i’ll be vulnerable here (screenshots or it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set up:" reads pretty clawdbot to me.
- bluishgreen 8mo agoIF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THAT ALL CAPS IS SHOUTY, then it is easy to follow that all lower is a whisper, informal, casual way to talk. there are people who dislike all caps, i do too. i feel even capitalizing the first part of nouns and such grammar is shouty. yup. different people have different sensitivities for different things. i always liked all lower, also picked it from python_programming for a decade. so i am happy for this trend.
- dmlerner 8mo agoi dislike pressing shift, especially on non-ergo (non-thumb) keyboards where it uses my pinky.
- renewiltord 8mo agoYou know how people used to wear the black turtleneck to channel Steve Jobs? This is how they channel Sam Altman (who also does this). It's just an affectation saying "I'm with Sam". There's not much more to it.
- cael450 8mo agoIt’s incredibly obnoxious. I feel like I’m ready AIM circa 2000.
- dang 8mo ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cyberrock 8mo agoIt mildly amuses and fascinates me, because for the last decade Gladwellians and business gurus have extolled the virtues of modern English as a flat, hierarchy-less language in comparison to Japanese, Korean, etc. which causes plane crashes. And yet here we see an overwhelming desire to create hierarchy in English, so the author can pretend to be more casual and ordinary.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]