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?
I 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.
Interesting, 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.
To me, writing in full, formally correct sentences, being careful to always use correct punctuation, starts to feel a little pretentious or tryhard in some contexts.
It doesn't feel too much like that here on HN. But on reddit, I use less formal structure most of the time, and that feels natural to me.
15 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.
If 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.
I 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)
I 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.
Of course you are free to do what you want on your blog, but some choices make it harder to read. IMO not capitalising is similar to using hard to read fonts or colours.
You're describing a 15 second effort that is performed at most once per phone purchase, and at its least once in the owner's entire history of iOS backup/restore processes. Less total effort than our comments took to write. You're then reading a whole lot into that.
> If 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?
That's incredibly presumptuous of you. That they're on their phone, that they had auto capitalization defaulted to on, that it's them who turned it off, that they didn't turn it off for whatever other reason (bugginess).
This 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.
> 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.
> 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.
It 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.
It'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.
In 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).
Most 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.
i 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).
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.
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.
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
