Comment by alchemist1e9
2 days ago
> It's a fad associated with AI, popularised by Sam Altman especially.
I know this is true but does anyone understand why they do it? It is actually cognitively disruptive when reading content because many of us are trained to simultaneously proof read while reading.
So I also consider it a type of cognitive attack vector and it annoys me extremely as well.
It's not true at all. It was very common, nearly norm in all online communication until phones started auto correcting with capitalization. You could always tell who was a mac/phone user by their use of capitalization. Sam is older than when that happened. He almost certainly spent the majority of his online life typing in lowercase, as I did. Go look at any old IRC chat log, forum, etc from his era.
The sibling comment to yours mentions that this is pretty common on Twitter, and I'd guess that it started as a way to making firing off tweets from a phone easier (since the extra effort to hit shift when typing on a phone keyboard is a bit higher, and the additional effort to go back and fix any typos that happen due to trying to capitalize things is also higher compared to using a traditional keyboard). Once enough people were doing it there, the style probably became recognizable and evoked a certain "vibe" that people wanted to replicate elsewhere, including in places where the original context of "hitting the shift key is more work than it's worth" doesn't hold as well.
> since the extra effort to hit shift when typing on a phone keyboard is a bit higher, and the additional effort to go back and fix any typos that happen due to trying to capitalize things is also higher compared to using a traditional keyboard
I'm a bit confused about this. Do people turn off auto capitalisation on their phones? I very rarely have to press shift on my phone
I and everyone I know turns it off. On many platforms and in many cultures, capitalization often implies Solemness or even rudeness in 1-on-1 conversations, and otherwise comes across as being out of touch in other kinds of communication.
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I hadn't considered that. My best guess is that it was originally an intentional decision based on consistency with nouns that people might have mid-sentence that they can't rely on autocorrect to capitalize properly.
>So I also consider it a type of cognitive attack vector
What does this mean?
I mean it seems very intentional and a passive aggressive technique to make the read feel disoriented while reading the content.
I can literally feel it assaulting my reading speed.