Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?English
    3·
    8 hours ago

    I’ve never heard of OP’s convention. But if I had to guess, it’s this:

    • It’s slow to input text on an onscreen keyboard compared to a physical one.

    • Mobile vendors try to reduce the number of keystrokes via predictive text and other tweaks in their onscreen keyboard software.

    • One common optimization (which I do not like and have off) is to try to reduce the effort to terminate a a sentence.

    • On iOS’s keyboard, tapping space twice inserts a period, then space. This is an easy action to perform.

    • I would assume that many iOS users are thus trained to only terminate sentences this way, and not to explicitly use periods. A trailing period requires extra effort and an unusual keystroke.

    • As a result, iOS users tend not to put in the extra effort, and so their sentences tend not to have a trailing period if not followed by a subsequent sentence.

    • For these users, the norm then becomes to omit a period on the final sentence, and so explicitly adding it looks like the user has gone out of their way to specially add punctuation. The trailing period then acquires semantic value, meaning.

    I expect that the whole thing stemmed from some random engineer at Apple just banging away trying to get average typing speed up, not spending a lot of time thinking about any linguistic or social impact.

    It could also be that Microsoft or Google do that by default — but I don’t use their default onscreen keyboards, and the descriptions I can find online of their default behavior sounds like they don’t.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?English
    15·
    1 day ago

    I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.

    It did not used to be like this.

    A high proportion of people on the Internet in the mid-90s were associated with tech or universities and were comparatively well-educated. It was not a representative slice of society.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

    Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.

    The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

    During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and learned to observe the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users.

    The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year university students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their university campuses. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.

    And that’s just college freshmen.

    Internet access today is more universally-available. I’d say that it’s just a product of seeing society as a whole writing.

    A lot of what people read in, say, the 1980s was from mass media. That generally had a journalist — a professional dedicated to writing — and an editor checking their work. Those people probably had gone to college specifically to pick up writing skills, and likely spent a large portion of their professional lives writing. They had a high level of expertise relative to the population as a whole in that field. Now what you’re reading is often without that filter. It’s not that people in society changed. It’s that you’d never seen society’s writing; you’d just been reading what experts put out.

    It’d be like most of what you’d seen your whole life was furniture created by professional carpenters, and then suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harry was creating their own furniture.

    I remember staring at YouTube comments when YouTube first came out and thinking “good God, these are terrible”. Randall Munroe, who clearly had the same reaction, did a whole cartoon about it:

    https://xkcd.com/202/

    https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Fyoutube.png

    The answer, of course, isn’t that YouTube users are unusual. It’s that the people who watch videos are more-representative of society than those who are writing and reading long-form text on Usenet or whatnot. That comes as a sudden and abrupt shock if you’re used to reading that Usenet stuff. That is, you’d been in a bubble, and that bubble went away.

    Randall worked at NASA. If you work at NASA and are accustomed to conversation among a bubble of what people who work at NASA say about space and then abruptly get thrown into an environment where people who don’t work at NASA are talking about space, I expect that it’s pretty shocking.

    I remember also reading about what happened when email entered into businesses. It kind of mirrored this. For a long time, it was kind of expected that executives would have a secretary, because doing things like typing wasn’t as widespread a skill and correcting errors on a typewriter was more time-consuming than it is today on a computer. A manager would likely at least get access to some sort of shared secretary, even if they didn’t merit a personal one. That secretary likely spent a lot of their professional life writing, and got to be pretty good at it. That secretary was probably a lot better at writing than the typical person out there. Then businesses generally decided that with email, a lot of this dedicated-secretary overhead wasn’t necessary, and arranged to have people just write their own memos. They promptly discovered that a lot of people high up in their org charts had very little ability to write understandably (probably in part because they’d been relying on secretaries to clean everything up for years), and for some years after email showing up in businesses, having training to remediate this was apparently something of a thing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarial_pool

    A secretarial pool or typing pool is a group of secretaries working at a company available to assist any executive without a permanently assigned secretary. These groups have been reduced or eliminated where executives have been assigned responsibility for writing their own letters and other secretarial work.

    After the widespread adoption of the typewriter but before the photocopier and personal computer, pools of typists were needed by large companies to produce documents from handwritten manuscripts, re-type documents that had been edited, type documents from audio recordings, or to type copies of documents.

    Is all this a bad thing?

    Well…the Internet has democratized communication. It means that everyone has a voice. It’s got pros and cons. It’s changed how politicians communicate (Trump being a good example). It means that it’s easier to get material out there, but that the material doesn’t have a filter on it that might have been useful.

    I think that it might well be the case that the average person today probably writes a lot more than they did in the past, because electronic communication enables written text to be so-readily and quickly transmitted. I’d wager that the average level of writing experience is higher today than in 1995. It’s just that you’re seeing a higher proportion of Average Joe’s writing than Jane the Journalist’s writing than you might have in 1995.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?English
    6·
    1 day ago

    I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing.

    I’m pretty sure that education helps. I used to hang out on /r/Europe, which had a lot of non-native English speakers…but who were generally very well educated (probably because of the sort of people who are going to be hanging out on an international forum and writing in some language that often isn’t their native tongue). The quality of the writing was pretty darn good. I’d say that the Dutch users there in particular wrote exceptionally clean English.

    That said, it was an interesting experience, because I discovered that there are completely different categories of errors that native and non-native speakers make. For example, I’ve seen plenty of native speakers here in the US confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, probably because they learned to speak the terms long before they wrote them and then kind of mentally linked them in the interim. I virtually never saw that error on /r/Europe, probably because a lot of Europeans learned to write English relatively-early compared to learning to speak it. But I did see a higher proportion of people having problems with some errors that aren’t common among native speakers:

    • Words where English has one word that passed through different languages and then entered English as two different words (e.g. bloc and block).

    • Headlines. Until spending time on that forum, I was basically oblivious to the fact that headlines in English use very different grammar, a different set of conventions, than standard English. I’d grown up reading them, internalized them, never thought about it. Then I wound up on a ton of posts with people in /r/Europe complaining that the submitted headline for an article was completely nonsensical or unreadable. To me, the headlines seemed completely reasonable; at first I thought that users were just joking. Took me a while to realize what was going on. I couldn’t even find any websites that provided a full summary of all of the headline-specific grammatical conventions, just some that had some common examples.

    • Words that have irregular prefixes. For example, someone might write “uncompatible” or “noncompatible” instead of “incompatible”. English has many different prefixes that can mean approximately “not”, (“a-”, “un-”, “anti-”, “non-”, “in-”, “im-”, “ir-”, “ex-”). Just have to memorize them, kind of like grammatical gender in some other languages. I’ve rarely seen native speakers not know the right irregular prefix, but that was an extremely-common error to see on /r/Europe.

    • Specifically for Slavic language users, I saw some users having trouble with definite/indefinite articles (something that doesn’t exist in Slavic languages and is actually fairly uncommon in languages globally) or using gendered pronouns where one wouldn’t in English (modern English has only the tiniest remaining vestiges of grammatical gender).

    Also, it was interesting to see where errors did crop up — my impression was that it tended to be with French or maybe Spanish speakers. My guess is that that’s because those languages are the other European languages that are also (relatively) widely-spoken around the world, and so by using English, you expand the pool of people you can talk to the least; I’d guess that people who speak these other languages use English less. For Spanish, it’s maybe a factor of 3. For French, maybe a factor of 5. Compare to something like Icelandic, where it’s something like a factor of 4,000.