Only after living here in Lemmyville where people still practice this civility did I realize that I’ve gotten in the bad habit of not capitalizing my sentences properly and now feel like the child raised by wolves now having tea with ye townsfolk.
I believe Reddit is to blame… because everything bad comes from them right?
Full transparency I was mostly in lurk/comment mode vs post and never cared about karma. No kids to have trained me this way. I swipe my keyboard which doesn’t do capitalization.
My working hypothesis is that with reportedly 400m users, quantity and speed to grab karma is more important than taking time to thoughtfully compose something. Its like 24/7 monkey with a gun redditing.
And like me, even if you’re not “playing” the culture still rubs off on you.
So now i’m wondering does this even matter or am I just over thinking this (wouldn’t be the first time).
Is formatting more important than the contribution? Because it just took me 5 mins to type this all out nicely and think i’ll going to be limited in what I can contribute if every post takes this long 🤣
I don’t mind if you take Earl Gray for your tea, or simply earl gray. It’s things like neglecting to put in paragraph breaks and a complete lack of punctuation that really bother me.
I also have a bias against u/ur etc. but I’m annoyingly pedantic about things like that. If Weird Al mocked it in “Word Crimes”, it’s likely on my list of peeves.
I believe Reddit is to blame… because everything bad comes from them right?
And I fully support your hypothesis here!
Regardless of how you choose to write things out, it’s always good to see another feline based username in these parts.
I don’t think it matters. We’re just chatting on the internet, who cares about proper formatting and such. You do you!
I do try to maintain proper grammar and capitalization online (to a reasonable degree), and, though I try not to, I’ve built a judgmental perspective against those who don’t. It’s not really about things like capitalization, though. The root of it lies in the baseline level of effort that’s expected in order to contribute.
I truly don’t understand the way some people choose to participate in online forums. In any large enough (and unmoderated) community, there are just pages and pages of single-line, uncapitalized, unpunctuated, emoji-strewn nonsense. None of these individually is a problem, but as a whole it seems to represent a fundamental lack of care about the quality of discussion.
But hey, maybe I’ve just become a crotchety bastard.
Linguistic forms that are associated with younger people and/or the internet tend to be stigmatized because of what I like to call the “WELL BACK IN MY DAY” sort of ideologies that shit on anything new. A lot of discourse about allegedly “bad” and “wrong” language is actually rooted in ideologies that stigmatize certain linguistic forms because of who they’re associated with. But it becomes so widely repeated that these linguistic forms are “bad”, and even people or organizations that portray themselves as authorities on language are saying that they’re “bad”, and so it simply becomes a “fact” that they’re “bad”.
a lot of times i don’t capitalize things either, and i’m a linguist. you should do whatever makes you happy. :)
I’ve been trying to get better about capitalization and stuff like that over the past couple months. Typically I switch styles depending on where I’m typing/who I’m talking to, but the more I think about it, it doesn’t really take me any extra time to do things correctly on the first pass.
You should type however you feel most comfortable though, and in whatever way you feel captures your voice!
