this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
428 points (97.8% liked)
Open Source
32388 readers
435 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It grinds my gears that someone who can't be fucked with capitalization has that much money and power. I get that using the shift key occasionally is an inconvenience but we do it to help the readers. A conversation is give and take.
Like all techbros it is an affectation to cultivate a certain sort of appearance. A type of mad faux intellectualism.
You literally have to be a tryhard to do all lowecase on a phone, for example.
i've disabled auto caps on my phone :o
i generally type in all lower case anyways because it appears more casual, at least to me. it's not exactly a rule i follow, so it's never consistent, and i don't mind capitalizing abbreviations and names and such anyways.
Same, but I generally only use all lowercase in IMs/other short form text media (so, not here), and when I’m writing German I do capitalize nouns. I’ve always had auto capitalization off since before I started this too since I’m used to pressing shift on the computer.
It seemed to be a trend amongst younger people who would disable auto capitalisation.
Who says he's on a phone?
i am on a phone. i did not press any extra keys to make my phone not do caps - this is because i have changed my phone to this, because when you write about technical things, capitalisation is important - lower case everything is lower case everything. i’m not about to start hitting an extra key at random times when this is perfectly fine. i’ve never had an issue reading all lower case
it’s not try-hard; it’s practical for people who work with tech
Don't you find capitalisation help to define sentences? It's much easier to read, particularly at speed.
personally, no i don’t. perhaps it’s because i skim a lot of code and im just used to it? i’m not sure, but honest truth i find capitals mostly redundant. perhaps useful to add context (names, acronyms, etc)… i add them for uncommon acronyms, but common things that people know i tend to skip too
you can say it’s lazy, and i’ll absolutely take that: it’s totally lazy… but there’s no weird effort or external image decision involved in it?
It's just an extra convention to help communication. But I don't buy your lazy argument because:-
and
Both of the reasons you’ve provided are nonsensical:
It is irrelevant that they don’t believe capitalization aids with clarity.
Communication is about what other people prefer, not what you personally like. And they obviously do want to communicate well
If a communication norm is just about other people’s preferences, why should they change? Who’s to say that other people’s preferences are more important than their own, particularly given that this particular preference is shared by millions of other people.
If inconsistent use of capitalization actually hinders understanding for some subset of their audience, then that’s a different story. My experience is that people are more likely to be annoyed than to actually have issues understanding all lowercase text. All caps text, on the other hand, is a different matter - and plenty of government and corporate entities are fine putting important text in all caps. But all caps text is a known accessibility issue. When I search for “all lowercase accessibility,” though, all I get is a bunch of results saying to not use all caps text for accessibility reasons.
If you have sources showing that all lowercase text is an accessibility concern, then you should share them. Heck, you should have led with that. But as it is, your argument ultimately boils down to “someone else should change what they do, that works for them, because it annoys me.”
Because communication is about getting your ideas and opinions into other people's minds. I may prefer to write in swahili, but my audience prefers English.
Over particular mediums for particular topics, yes the all lowercase preference may dominate. ALL CAPS FOR SHOUTING and miXeD CaPs FoR cRAzY provide excellent emphasis. But history shows that capitalization is an advantage. It was invented during the printing press and stayed as convention.
Here's some more discussion
Having tried to learn a language (Bengali) that does not use capitals, I can attest to their use. If you're starting out, how do you tell a name from another noun? Are you talking about chandra (the moon) or Chandra (the common surname)? There are so many cases in every language where common and proper nouns overlap, and having capitalization is very helpful.
i disabled auto-capitalisation a decade ago on my phone and that change has persisted ever since, but yeah guess i'm a tryhard. yeesh, being a grammar "nazi" was uncool even back then on reddit, imagine still being hard up about it in 2025.
Man... I initially read that as
and I was thoroughly confused.
This is the Reason why Germans are angry all the Time.