While reading this, every time I started a paragraph and saw a lowercase, my brain and eyes were stalling or jumping up, to reflexively look for the text that got cut off. My brain has been trained for decades that, when reading full prose, a paragraph starting with lowercase means I'm starting in the middle of a sentence, and something happened in the layout or HTML to interrupt it.
And, I know this seems dramatic, but besides being cognitively distracting, it also makes me feel sad. Chatroom formatting in published writings is clearly a developing trend at this point, and I love my language so much. Not in a linguistic capacity - I'm not an English expert or anything, nor do I follow every rule - I mean in an emotional capacity.
I'm not trying to be condescending. This is a style choice, not "bad writing" in the typical sense. I realize there is often a lot of low-quality bitterness on both sides about this kind of thing.
Edit:
I also fear that this is exactly the kind of thing where any opinion in opposition to this style will feel like the kind of attack that makes a writer want to push back in a "oh yeah? fuck you" kind of way. I.e. even just my writing this opinion may give an author using the style in question the desire to "double down". Though this conundrum is appropriate (ironic?) - the intensely personal nature of language is part of why I love it.
"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
Yeah, sorry. That was probably my last comment on this trend, since I think I've said all I have to say. However, I do think "too common" implicitly narrows the definition of "tangential annoyances" - I believe this is a new phenomenon (though I understand the spirit of the rule is to not have comment threads about things other than the content of the submission).
My degrees all were in philosophy, focused on philosophy of language.
Descriptive language is how language evolves, and the internet is the first real regional conflict area that Americans have really ever encountered without traveling.
History, you would have just been in your linguistic local, with your own rules, and differences could easily been attributed to outsiders being outsiders. The internet flattens physical distance.
Thus we have a real parallel to the different regions of Italy, where no one came understand each other, or at least the UK, where different cities have extreme pronunciation differences.
The same exists for written language, and it will continue to diverge culturally. The way I look at it is that language isn’t a thing, trapped in amber, but a river we are all wading through. Different people enter at different times, and we all subtly affect the flow.
I distinctly remember thinking “email” was the dumbest sounding word ever. Now I don’t even hear it.
It’s still fine to nitpick, we’re all battling in the descriptive war for correctness. My own personal hobbyhorse is how stupid American quotations syntax is, when learning at graduate school in the UK that you use single quotes and leave the punctuation outside of the quoted sections, which is entirely sensible!
Weirdly I’m not really bothered by the absence of capitals.
IT COULD BE WORSE, YOU COULD BE READING A LENGTHY ESSAY PRESENTED ENTIRELY IN ALL CAPS WITH MINIMAL PUNCTUATION TO BREAK IT UP
SEARCH FOR “FILM CRIT HULK” FOR SOME EXAMPLES
POTUS, is that you?
HULK SMASH INFERENCE PRICES
It’s to draw contrast against extremely polished and sterile looking slop content. Think of it like avoiding em dash but going a bit far.
> all content here is generated by ai
It is lazy.