This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
I’ve on the Internet for the same amount of time and it’s gotten MUCH worse.
I mean everybody has their own experience so I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong, but that’s not been my experience.
I spent more than 10 years playing text-based roleplaying games (MUSHes) from like ~1993 on, and even people who had multiple scenes a day that were well beyond short story length were frequently just god-awful at spelling. I had a lot of bad habits I picked up from back then that I’ve had to break, some of which (misspelling ‘separate’ as ‘seperate’, f.ex) that still get me sometimes. So at the very least there has been no shortage of awful spelling in the early days of the internet.
By the same token I now spend at least an hour or two a day reading lemmy, reddit, etc and usually several more playing video games where I should’ve been exposed to all this awful typing going on and I have not noticed an increase, much less one worthy of capital letters.
So, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that as someone who has spent a significant portion of their life reading text on the internet it doesn’t seem likely to me.
