Comment by 1dom

> Twitter and all forms of instant messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, Discord, and the older ones like AIM/MSN/ICQ) have normalized it for many years.

Half true. In SMS it was just easier, but in IM it mostly was a thing because the IM client's message boundaries acted as markers for beginning/end of sentence, making the formatting unnecessary. That's why using correct capitalization and periods for single sentences came to be associated with a more formal/serious tone, it was unnecessary so including it meant you wanted to emphasize it.

Even back then we'd use regular formatting outside of IM or when sending multiple sentences in a single message.

> He's adopting the native culture rather than setting a trend.

If this was the intent, it's really coming off as that "Hello, fellow kids" meme, rather than genuine.

> He's adopting the native culture rather than setting a trend.

Maybe he should consider there are different registers of language, and code-switching is a thing. This now increasingly applies to written language, not just spoken language.

Writing this way in structured, formal discourse would be equivalent to a CEO using internet memes and trendy slang in board meetings.

Look at AOL Instant Messenger in 1999 and this is how everyone in school wrote.

Guess what… the people who used AIM in 1999 are now middle aged…

It's 2025 and my phone has been automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence for about a decade. Doesn't it take more effort to do it the wrong way?

>Sam is just one of the few large company CEOs to tweet in the style other Twitter users usually use.

Just looked at the algorithmic feed on Twitter to makes sure trends haven't shifted overnight, and zero people in that sample of hundreds of tweets used all lower case in the tweets. Not in science. Not in AI. Not in maths or politics or entertainment or media.

Sam is trying to bE dIFFERENT. He isn't adopting a norm but instead he's trying to make one. It looks ridiculous.

When you consciously choose to save yourself effort in writing, at the expense of the readers who are trying to make sense of what you are saying, the people onto whom you've transferred the cognitive load are not likely to appreciate your laziness.

Hey, sorry! I don't want you to feel bad, and I don't think you should.

I think there are legitimate reasons to struggle with things like capital letters, and you've named a few: non-native language and interface device limitations. There's other accessibility reasons too, like I have some dyslexic family members who use less capitalisation than most. Also, direct or casual communication with individuals, the impact of the extra cognitive load is minimal - 1 or 2 people - so again, no real issue.

The problem I have with this piece is that it's clearly meant to be an intellectual or academic-adjacent piece, and it's clearly meant to be public/read by many people - that's why we're reading it on Hackernews. The author is not putting in the extra few seconds required to fix the problem when writing, and as a result, many thousands of people lose a few seconds each when reading. I feel there must be a point where the cost of the extra reading time to humanity outweighs the benefits of the intellectual contribution - I can't really tell because even if I overlook the capitalisation, I'm not smart enough to understand it anyway.

For completeness: I also disable all autocorrect/autocomplete on mobile because it's more trouble than it's worth, but I leave auto-capitalisation on. This is a thing, they're independent settings.

> EDIT: people are seriously so emotionally invested in capitalization that i get downvoted into minus, jeez.

I find it weird that you would be surprised that people care about the quality of textual communication

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.

>So I also consider it a type of cognitive attack vector

What does this mean?