16 ms·

Gen Z Netiquettes

166 points by alanng 4y ago

mouse_ 4y ago
gen z here - stop using so many emojis; they make you seem fake. maybe 1/4th of your messages should contain emojis if you legitimately feel the need to "mask" as gen z for some reason.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mlindner 4y ago
Is this written sarcastically?
- vsnf 4y ago
  No. It’s written to be funny but I can vouch that these rules, such as they are, are all more or less correct.
  - tgv 4y ago
    I asked my daughter and her friend who was with her (both 20) if there's a difference between "I'll be home" and "I'll be home." They confirmed, and said the latter is much more serious. And this is in The Netherlands. I proposed that they were (sort of) pronouncing the punctuation, as in "I'll be home. Period.", and it seems to sound that way. Odd, but it seems wide-spread.
    - sushzbdbehsh 4y ago
      if my girlfriend texted me >I'll be home. I'd assume she was breaking up with me
    - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
      > pronouncing the punctuation I do not think you can think of it that way. It's said that the subtleties of spoken language are lost in text, but in this case, the subtleties of the written word are lost in spoken language.
  - dilap 4y ago
    i'm millenial/gen-x cusp, and they all seemed pretty reasonable and intuitive to me, EXCEPT number 3 -- a good-old fashioned simple smiley is passive-aggressive and cold to gen-z??
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Serious take: The new generation rejects what was acceptable to the previous generation as part of the process of developing their own identity. Humorous take: Sensitive snowflakes gonna sensitive.
      - eschatology 4y ago
        Here's an attempt to demonstrate how :) can come off as very toxic or passive aggressive: --- Serious take: The new generation rejects what was acceptable to the previous generation as part of the process of developing their own identity :) Humorous take: Sensitive snowflakes gonna sensitive :)
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        And I say that's their problem. ┐(￣ー￣)┌
        Jach 4y ago
        I got into the habit of using =P to suggest humor or not being too serious, but since I picked it up from someone at least 10 years older than me, I suppose it could come off as toxic or arrogant to people 10 years younger and none have told me yet
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      That was the most real one imo. The :) is super toxic. Least aggressive would be ^^ or :3
      - debugnik 4y ago
        No zoomer I talk to has any idea what ^^ means, it seems like a millennial giveaway. I haven't tested :3, but in general it seems to me they're barely aware of plain-text emotes.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    They're correct but it's written in kind of a cringe Buzzfeed way
  - mlindner 4y ago
    I have a much younger cousin who happens to be Gen Z and he said that it's mostly exaggerated but saw some elements of it when talking to girls. He's a freshman in university at the moment.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Those are all unironically true. But what does it mean when the third boyfriend of my first boyfriend whose first boyfriend I was keeps watching my Instagram stories but not following me, considering my first boyfriend blocked me everywhere? Are they sitting there together laughing at my stories? Does he watch me out of low self confidence? He must know I know he is watching them. Should I write him? That kind of would violate my rule to accept my first ex desire not to communicate with me ever again. Young people / social media communication and whole new categories of communication channels / signs/cues like getting your story watched is quite complex!
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    (ノ゜Д゜)ノ ⌒┻━┻
  - Obscurity4340 4y ago
    I will never use any kind of messaging platform that insists on "Read receipts", or even worse, the typing breadcrumbs. Fuck that shit, I'll reply when I'm good and ready, that's a big part of what makes it fun. You never know when you're going to get a sweet little squirt of dopamine == unexpected or surprise reply
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Everyone just reads them in the notifications so they don’t mark as read
      - cj 4y ago
        Can confirm. I have iMessage read receipts turned on. New text comes in, read it in the notification and don't open it until I'm ready to respond.
      - toastal 4y ago
        Except for privacy reasons, I don't show the message body in notifications.
      - 4y ago
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  I don't think so. I found myself lol'ing (as in actually laughing out loud) at the accuracy.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  For sarcasm sentences can be suffixed with /s I refuse to do this on Reddit. I long for a simpler time when it was literally impossible to tell who was being sarcastic and who is a genuine crazy person.
flumpcakes 4y ago
> 9. Capitalizing the first letter in a sentence will reveal where you are This one really surprises me, if someone contacted me without bothering to type a proper sentence I would just think they're an idiot. Everyone I know always starts a sentence with a capital letter, no matter the platform. They all know how to use the shift key. This isn't even gate keeping, people use slang all the time, it is basic English. News, books, articles, tutorials, emails, teams, share point... Everything I read every day has proper capitalization.
- wafflemaker 4y ago
  What about chatting or just shooting off one off messages? Isn't shift an overkill then?
  - flumpcakes 4y ago
    Yeah, I think I should say that when a longer conversation is _ongoing_ then I think dropping capital letters and full stops is more natural as the conversation flows. If I am trying to communicate something or it's the first message then it's always capitalized with the usual punctuation. Maybe even a semi-colon if I am feeling listy.
- tuxxi 4y ago
  typing without capitalization can help to create a more informal, somewhat playful tone. same goes for slight misspellings or abbrs instead of spelling out the full word. its just another way to add a small amount of “tone”.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    My impression of people who write like that is that they're 9 years old and somehow made it on the big-boy Internet. Mostly because the content of messages written in that fashion gives that impression as well. It's sloppier than the average youtube comment.
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
antegamisou 4y ago
Am I on 2018 Buzzfeed right now? Refrain from upvoting dumb shit people.
- bertman 4y ago
  You should at least skim it, it's funny :)
mdhb 4y ago
Might be a bit of a boomer opinion but the thing that kept coming up for me as I was reading that was “damn, that’s a lot of social insecurity built in by default to almost every interaction and conversation”. Not all of it obviously and I don’t even think that’s strictly a Gen Z thing specifically (much of it could have been written about my mother for example) but JFC it sounds emotionally draining way to live your life.
- dbspin 4y ago
  I find this often meeting 'zoomers' in person. In contrast to the glued to the phone cliche, they're often enormously attentive, in an almost pained way. Incredibly careful in how they speak and - in accordance with the 'triggered' cliche - very easily upset or offended. Not only by transgression of their numerous linguistic prohibitions, but even misunderstandings about potential transgressions. The simplest way to explain it is they seem to assume bad faith, that things were ill intended, and that the worst interpretation something someone says is accurate. They seem to have grown up at a time of rapidly changing speech and behavioural codes, immersed in a culture that has harsh instantaneous judgement for their transgression. It seems like an extremely fraught and anxiety inducing way of being.
  - groestl 4y ago
    > the worst interpretation something someone says is accurate Well, to give just a few examples: * The worst interpretation of a sentence said by politicians is usually accurate * In contractual law, the worst interpretation of a clause is the one you need to prepare for * In advertising, the absolute worst interpretation of a phrase is usually accurate * If you get a letter of recommendation, the worst interpretation is the intended one So you adapt to this world.
    - dbspin 4y ago
      All of those things have been true at least since the dawn of mass media in the early 20th century. I'm speaking about intergenerational change, and interpersonal interactions. Perhaps the difference is that we all now exist as though on the public stage. Either way, perceiving everyday interactions in that way is dispiriting and closes you off from people with different experiences and perspectives. It can make your everyday life - rather than just your online existence - a rigid, carefully managed echo-chamber.
a1371 4y ago
Some of these make a lot of sense, not just as a Gen Z thing, but overall adopting them shouldn't annoy anyone. I will continue ending my sentences with a full stop but maybe I'll start picking more expressive emojis than :)
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Go full boomer and send :-)
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    :o)
    - FinnKuhn 4y ago
      Ö
      - rom-antics 4y ago
        Beautiful, and all this time I thought HN didn't render emojis
        shagie 4y ago
        That's an uppercase O with an umlaut on it. I type this with 'option u shift o'. For example - https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara Sahara (arabiska: الصحراء الكبرى, aṣ-ṣaḥrā' al-kubra, "Den största öknen") You'll note the öknen there and if it was capitalized you'd have Öknen.
      - wellthisisgreat 4y ago
        =)
  - heckelson 4y ago
    in the German speaking sphere we used to use ggg to mean laughing, and the more g-s, the harder you were laughing
forgotpwd16 4y ago
K, haha. :) Am I doing it right?
bitwize 4y ago
Not stated, but implicit: If you have an Android phone, throw it away. No one wants to see your green bubbles, and no one can see if you've seen their texts if you have an Android. Get an iPhone, like 90% of Gen Z. Or gtfo.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >no one can see if you've seen their texts if you have an Android. That sounds like a feature.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    You can disable that in iOS too.
- mouse_ 4y ago
  I don't wanna see people who hold brands above people, I'll stick with my Android. Though I must admit I do judge people with Samsung phones, simply for accepting the worst of both worlds.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Who TF is still using sms (or whatever chimera its morphed into) in the year 2023? All, and I really do mean ALL, messages that arrive on my phone are over whatsapp, telegram or discord. The green/blue bubble thing is classist and problematic and bringing it up is frankly embarrassing.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    > whatever chimera its morphed into Apple's Messages > Who TF is still using Americans
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      Counterpoint: I'm American.
ehnto 4y ago
The full stop thing has been around since IRC networks, or I imagine any quick-response short message platform. No one ever explicitly explains it or notes it, you just pick up on it. Same with the difference colours of laughter "lol, rofl, haha, hahaha, lmao, ha." They're all just laughing but I bet you had different ideas about how each of them feel. This happens with language at large, synonymous words pick up nuanced differences so that we can express ourselves better, they aren't codified they just spread naturally. I think for full stops, it's like the difference between familiar language and polite language. If you are too polite with a close friend you give off the impression that you're not close enough for casual language, which can be insulting.
- airstrike 4y ago
  :).
- butler14 4y ago
  Logged in to say the same; all of these have ultimately formed back in IRC days and have aged remarkably well since The only one that is new (and therefore annoying to me as an Old Internet Man) is the insistance of adding emojis into every sentence For a while I could guess someones approximate age because of it, but now some of my 40+ friends have started emojiing like a 14 year olds too
  - aaron695 4y ago
    [dead]
  - hollowcelery 4y ago
    Emojis are a more granular and expressive form of the more traditional lol, rofl, haha, :), :(. They’re a useful side channel for expressing tone.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      That isn't a feature though. As it means and renders completely different in different contexts and apps.
sdfjkl 4y ago
Wonderful.
devnullbrain 4y ago
Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a ponytail and a motorbike. If you find yourself finding smug, try looking at an old Reddit rage comic/4chan greentext/usenet flamewar, depending on your age.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  There's a lot more to gen z than was on this blog post, but what is there seems like a recipe for creating personality disorders.
  - wafflemaker 4y ago
    pls elaborate. The blog post was very informative for me. Learning even more would be nice. If it's good I'll submit it to the blogpost's author as he asked for at the end of the blogpost.
    - yucky 4y ago
      Not using any punctuation and relying on pictograms instead of definable words, and then getting hung up on who (and how many people) respond to a social post, and in what way and with what timing? Holy shit, no wonder they're all so perpetually miserable.
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  >The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. > - Socrates, 400 B.C. >Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a diadema and a peneia. > - the youth, 400 B.C. --- >The children now love the internet; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love reddit in place of blog posts. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer use facebook while their uncles still do. They contradict their parents, text before company, gobble up memes on TikTok, twerk, and tyrannize their teachers. > - boomers, 2023 A.D. >Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a ponytail and a motorbike. > - devnullbrain, 2023 A.D.
SunghoYahng 4y ago
[flagged]
- notarobot123 4y ago
  [flagged]
- cj 4y ago
  To be fair, when I was a teenager 20 years ago in the 2000's chatting on AIM or MSN Messenger: - Most people didn't capitalize - People used a blend of text and regular emojis - Acronyms were rampant... "sup", "nm", "wbu", "wyd", "brb", etc... - Many of the same rules applied re: use of periods, having different meanings for "okay" vs. "kk" vs. "ok" These rules started to form 20 years ago. Not new to this generation.
m3drano 4y ago
kay.
Havoc 4y ago
Stupid question perhaps, but how does one separate sentences without fullstops then?
- dschuetz 4y ago
  when you send
- eschatology 4y ago
  - Just send them as multiple lines or messages - Ending a sentence with period sounds overly serious for one-liner or short messages. If you write multiple sentences in a message it's still OK to use periods (though writing a long paragraph over multiple messages can also come off as serious, so ultimately it depends on the tone you want to convey in your message)
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  Everything there is to say is at most one sentence, it's twitter like "conversations" everywhere. If it's not funny after 3s of reading it's not worth their attention, that's why meme pictures are the best. I have a feeling many would have problems reading basic articles where their attention would scream about jumping paragraphs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _dain_ 4y ago
  the article doesn't get the rule quite right. if you're sending a message with more than one sentence in it, a full stop is fine. but on shorter messages, the end-of-sentence is implied by the end of the message, so putting in a full stop on top of that is redundant. it seems like you're putting extra emphasis on the ending part, and the implication is something like: "there will be no further discussion." so it can seem hostile. and this isn't a gen z thing. it's just how instant messaging has worked forever.
- FinnKuhn 4y ago
  The rule should have been to not use a full stop for the last sentence. You still need them to separate your sentences (unless you send them as separate messages)
kavaruka 4y ago
this is not gen Z, but late millennials
- rendall 4y ago
  This. The younguns in your chats do not use many emojis.
hamasho 4y ago
I think emojis are an objectively better communication tool. You can pack more emotion and nuances in emojis with much fewer characters. Yet I hate when I see them... Probably because I'm getting older and becoming less tolerant of young culture. Sad Edit: I added a few emojis in the original message, but it seems automatically removed—another nice thing for hacker news.
- tjoff 4y ago
  Not really, they mean totally different things to different generations etc. and to add to that depending on your app and system they render completely different as to change the entire meaning. And that is before taking into account totally arbitrary shortcuts and meanings are introduced in various communities. As a communication tool within a tight group, sure. But outside that emojis are pretty darn bad. Unless you stick to the subset that pretty closely maps to ascii smileys.
- silveroriole 4y ago
  I’ve seen emojis completely banned on some codes of conduct because of potential offence. The OK hand symbol, the basic smiley face, or using the white skin tone on Slack could all be seen as hostile by some groups of people. Yeah it’s a bit crazy but this is one of the necessities of inviting lots of diverse groups of different ages and backgrounds to work together - there’s less of a base of shared communication and more risk of angering others, so communication must become more formal and defensive (at least until people establish good will with each other).
demindiro 4y ago
Meanwhile I've never encountered these "netiquettes" whoever I'm talking to. Perhaps every generation isn't a monoculture.
- cal85 4y ago
  Yep, these kind of articles are nonsense clickbait. The idea that there’s a special GenZ rule about full stops is bullshit. It’s all just tone and context. If you’re texting someone who evidently likes ending every message with a full stop, you obviously aren’t going to assume every single message is insulting (unless you’re an idiot or very paranoid). If you’re texting with someone who never uses full stops but then they suddenly use one at the end of a message and the message is kind of abrupt (like if it’s refusing a request) then it might feel kind of ‘firm’. This is something any intelligent/sensitive person, at any age, could pick up on, or not. It’s nothing to do with GenZ. It’s been this way since the start of internet messaging. It’s just recently become a dumb meme that fills column inches in newspapers because it creates a confused talking point where boomers etc are supposed to be aghast that they’ve been accidentally offending GenZ people by using full stops. It’s just dumb, dumb, dumb.
toastal 4y ago
For me, one of the biggest indicators that someone is from a generation older than my own is seeing two spaces after a period.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Or if their email font is something other than default. Comic Sans means they’re 55~60 and up.
scotty79 4y ago
So many of this rules feel like coddling other person's anxiety through obligatory reciprocation. Social media platforms approve.
- mingus88 4y ago
  That’s a great way of putting it An entire generation has been trained by Mark Zuckerberg to boost engagement on his properties
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Coddling other people's [issues] just sounds like any other social norms to me.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    No that's not a recipe for healthy relationships. A healthy relationship is where you excuse others accidental faux pas in the interest of maintaining a good relationship. Only if they become highly offensive do you consider breaking off relations. That's how social norms work.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      I'm not talking about faux pas. I'm talking about the things you're expected to do, or not do, for the sake of managing the emotions of others.
      - mlindner 4y ago
        People don't normally manage the emotions of others (other than maybe a hysterical girlfriend). At least it's not something I've ever done.
plaguepilled 4y ago
I think it's implicit, but in case anyone didn't pick up on this, these tips are HIGHLY group dependent, which is roughly equivalent to being dependent on what app you use.
proto-n 4y ago
I'm far from gen z, but I spent a lot of time communicating through chat in the past ~20 years, and I've gotta say, to me, most of this is not "Gen Z" stuff, but "chat native" stuff. It becomes pretty obvious pretty soon when somebody doesn't really know the (for lack of a better word) language of these small nuances and a bunch of others, like message length, timings, etc. It's not done to be edgy, or to fit in, or anything like that. Its different tones in text. If the other party doesn't speak this language, then the communication becomes very literal, very formal. Kind of like how someone who is oblivious to social cues comes across in spoken conversations, only without the stigma, as its quite normal to not know this stuff. But it's much harder to 'feel' the other person.
- gonehome 4y ago
  A lot of it isn’t just chat native stuff imo. All the rules around instagram likes and reposting, the rules around “k”, that “:)” is passive aggressive etc. A lot of that feels juvenile which makes sense if it’s a gen z post. I’d guess it’ll stop once out of teens and early to mid twenties. I think when people are more secure/confident they stop doing as much meta analysis of this kind.
  - rom-antics 4y ago
    k
    - brmgb 4y ago
      Yes, feeling offended about being called young is part of the package too. We know, we used to be.
- neilv 4y ago
  Yeah, much of these (or variations) applied to online live chat or async forums in the '90s. Though different venues had different conventions. And rules like in the article would all be easy to remember. What's not in the article is whether/what skills you'll need to develop to process all this information and noise. For example, I remember seeing a busy chat room for the first time in the mid-'90s, and there was so much people talking, and it was scrolling seemingly too fast to read. (Bonus: I was on a then-vintage green CRT terminal, HP 2392A, at that moment, so incomprehensible scrolling of symbols was not entirely unlike the Matrix visual.) But after some experience with the chat, it was no longer overwhelming. I could glance at the scrollage and have a sense of who was talking, what was being discussed, and possibly some meta of what was going on. And, for incoming messages, I could be tracking and selectively focusing among the often multiple concurrent threads of conversation. I suppose skills a bit analogous to that might include how to manage the many different online services today you have to be on today, applying critical processing to advertising/engagement feed algorithms, juggling all this inefficient stuff with more real-life things, etc.
spicyusername 4y ago
I was expecting a list of unrelatable norms, but I think these apply for most people who regularly use digital means of communication, regardless of age.
jasoneckert 4y ago
This deserves a new RFC - the original is outdated: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855
- alanng 4y ago
  not sure if some temporary generational convention can make it to RFC lol
- mlindner 4y ago
  Given that most of the stuff in the top article are the conversation of children that will quickly go away as they stop being children, I don't think it's worth having it be written down.
j1elo 4y ago
Very tangentially related: Instagram just started to roll out their new "status" line that shows up over your photo in everybody's message lists. It's like if MSN Messenger status were back again, and young people that I know are loving it :) I guess some ideas are fun no matter the generation. There are also older people who got to experience MSN Messenger, and are asking when the music status updates will come too! Meta/Fb just brought a decades-old staple into their app, and I find that amusing.
notacoward 4y ago
Fortunately, most Zoomers are very good at code switching. For example, I had a conversation with my daughter about laughing emoji vs. skull and crossbones ("ded") because I was seeing tons of online discourse about it. Her response was "It's not a big deal to me or any of my friends because we know you're old." Well, ouch, but also OK. So I still text in complete sentences etc. and she doesn't and it's all fine.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Very american reaction: reading too much into text messages and expecting superficial over friendliness. That's not a gen z thing. That's an entitle US social media projection.
- nchie 4y ago
  This is as accurate in Europe, and much of it has been for the last 15 years at the very least.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LoveMortuus 4y ago
Irrelevant to the article, but it is a part of it, which made me think: "Disclaimer: theoretically speaking I’m a genZ. But I could never identify myself as one because I never quite know about most of the rules until recently. This is a gen Z edition, because gen Z practices these rules a lot, not because I’m one." I don't think the generation you're born in is something you identify with. Nor do I think that people "practice" the generational rules, as these "rules" are the result of their behaviour not something that one would practice/actively strive to do. As such, no matter what you do, that actions and behaviour is of the generation that you're born into. Example: You don't choose your parents, nor do you choose your siblings. If most of your siblings engage in daily running but you don't, saying that you don't identify as a child of you parents because children of your parents engage in daily running, is a bit of a backwards to the objective truth. (I can't think of a better way to put it into words, but I hope that fellow thinkers can see the logic that I'm trying to explain.) Maybe something like this: It is illogical to define yourself by the actions of others. Or: The actions of others, front define who you are. tl;dr: You are GenZ not because of what you do. But because what you do, is done by GenZ. Edit: You are not a man because you do manly things. Things are manly because a man does them.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
I deliberately violate most of these to filter out people who aren't worth my time, lqtm.
0x008 4y ago
None of this is new to me. I can totally identify with most of the gotchats presented in the article. I am far from being a Gen Z. If you were actually active on irc or icq, msn, aol (which are even explecitly mentioned in the blog post!) you know all this.
lleb97a 4y ago
It only just occurred to me that I finish every sentence with a . While no one I'm talking to does.
retrac 4y ago
Prognostication over the presence or absence of a single punctuation point seems like a problem for the reader. It assumes the author has the same background and understanding of these fine points that the reader does. This is probably an unreasonable assumption. I used to look for these shibboleths and hidden implications from minor stylistic issues. It's a bad habit. It often does reveal much. But it also tends to apophenia - seeing patterns that are not there. And it's so fuzzy that preconception tends to dominate. (You only worry about the abruptness of 'K.' if you're already worried about what they think of you.) As a writer, try to follow the style your audience expects. That advice applies to informal personal communications. But don't engage heavily in this practice as a reader. It can be counterproductive to communication.
rib3ye 4y ago
> I never thought of this until a friend asked "Were you outside when texting me?" The only thing that surprised me was that "outside" simply means "outside your home" now.
elteto 4y ago
Honestly, I can’t keep up with so much implied context about everything I type. It sounds exhausting.
dav_Oz 4y ago
To be fair given the context of snapchatting, tiktoking, voicemessaging, online dating [... stories, filters ...] written text is simply demoted to snippets of additional information/expressiveness. Sentence-s, well structured sentences (with it punctuation marks and capitalization) are in this context like evoking latin phrases let alone a fortiori whole paragraphs. If one takes chatgpt into the equation writing essays will be as calculating without a calculator for the next adolescent generation and used mainly as intimidation given the current education system - or preferably a playful approach at pattern recognition emerging from formal rules conveying abstract concepts.
maximus-decimus 4y ago
> Your friend texts you "I am happy for you." --> Highly likely they hate you and even wish the worst for you, but they have to text anyway cuz every friend in the group is doing so. People must really think I hate them lol.
idk1 4y ago
Total side thought - people capitalizing letters at the start of sentences because they're on mobile and not because they're on a laptop, would be a fantastic clue in a detective novel to flag up what device someone is sending messages with.
braingenious 4y ago
> I was born a couple of years before the golden era of Yahoo Chat Wouldn’t this make the author a millennial?
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  Yahoo chat was most popular from about 2002-2004, so no.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    Ah that makes sense. I guess I’ll still confused about the talk of Yahoo messenger along with this: >As I’m stepping into my late 20s… What is Gen Z? My rule of thumb has been “people that definitely don’t remember 9/11” to distinguish between two very different generations.
    - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
      Someone born in 1998 would be entering the later half of their 20s this year. Gen Z is generally said to begin in 1997.
      - braingenious 4y ago
        Oh ok! I suppose that makes sense, thanks!
jacooper 4y ago
I'm gonna zooming away laughing because i basically don't use any zoomer social media.
navjack27 4y ago
My only impression after reading this is that gen z must be filled with anxiety constantly. My stomach hurts. Why are they like this? Why are they making so many negative assumptions about the other participant in a conversation? Why is everything malicious?
ravagat 4y ago
This is really funny. Some things I understand and some I find just foolish. Thanks for sharing
thefz 4y ago
Why is this garbage on HN?
- HumanReadable 4y ago
  because it's incredibly interesting
intel_brain 4y ago
nobody should play along with this bullshit. grow up. This is just some stupid kids, who have all time to "feel" things.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
> But do NOT ever send :) or Is this a thing now? Smileys are bad?

166 points by alanng 4y ago

gen z here - stop using so many emojis; they make you seem fake. maybe 1/4th of your messages should contain emojis if you legitimately feel the need to "mask" as gen z for some reason.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mlindner 4y ago

Is this written sarcastically?

vsnf 4y ago
No. It’s written to be funny but I can vouch that these rules, such as they are, are all more or less correct.
- tgv 4y ago
  I asked my daughter and her friend who was with her (both 20) if there's a difference between "I'll be home" and "I'll be home." They confirmed, and said the latter is much more serious. And this is in The Netherlands. I proposed that they were (sort of) pronouncing the punctuation, as in "I'll be home. Period.", and it seems to sound that way. Odd, but it seems wide-spread.
  - sushzbdbehsh 4y ago
    if my girlfriend texted me >I'll be home. I'd assume she was breaking up with me
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    > pronouncing the punctuation I do not think you can think of it that way. It's said that the subtleties of spoken language are lost in text, but in this case, the subtleties of the written word are lost in spoken language.
- dilap 4y ago
  i'm millenial/gen-x cusp, and they all seemed pretty reasonable and intuitive to me, EXCEPT number 3 -- a good-old fashioned simple smiley is passive-aggressive and cold to gen-z??
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Serious take: The new generation rejects what was acceptable to the previous generation as part of the process of developing their own identity. Humorous take: Sensitive snowflakes gonna sensitive.
    - eschatology 4y ago
      Here's an attempt to demonstrate how :) can come off as very toxic or passive aggressive: --- Serious take: The new generation rejects what was acceptable to the previous generation as part of the process of developing their own identity :) Humorous take: Sensitive snowflakes gonna sensitive :)
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        And I say that's their problem. ┐(￣ー￣)┌
      - Jach 4y ago
        I got into the habit of using =P to suggest humor or not being too serious, but since I picked it up from someone at least 10 years older than me, I suppose it could come off as toxic or arrogant to people 10 years younger and none have told me yet
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    That was the most real one imo. The :) is super toxic. Least aggressive would be ^^ or :3
    - debugnik 4y ago
      No zoomer I talk to has any idea what ^^ means, it seems like a millennial giveaway. I haven't tested :3, but in general it seems to me they're barely aware of plain-text emotes.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  They're correct but it's written in kind of a cringe Buzzfeed way
- mlindner 4y ago
  I have a much younger cousin who happens to be Gen Z and he said that it's mostly exaggerated but saw some elements of it when talking to girls. He's a freshman in university at the moment.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Those are all unironically true. But what does it mean when the third boyfriend of my first boyfriend whose first boyfriend I was keeps watching my Instagram stories but not following me, considering my first boyfriend blocked me everywhere? Are they sitting there together laughing at my stories? Does he watch me out of low self confidence? He must know I know he is watching them. Should I write him? That kind of would violate my rule to accept my first ex desire not to communicate with me ever again. Young people / social media communication and whole new categories of communication channels / signs/cues like getting your story watched is quite complex!
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  (ノ゜Д゜)ノ ⌒┻━┻
- Obscurity4340 4y ago
  I will never use any kind of messaging platform that insists on "Read receipts", or even worse, the typing breadcrumbs. Fuck that shit, I'll reply when I'm good and ready, that's a big part of what makes it fun. You never know when you're going to get a sweet little squirt of dopamine == unexpected or surprise reply
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Everyone just reads them in the notifications so they don’t mark as read
    - cj 4y ago
      Can confirm. I have iMessage read receipts turned on. New text comes in, read it in the notification and don't open it until I'm ready to respond.
    - toastal 4y ago
      Except for privacy reasons, I don't show the message body in notifications.
    - 4y ago
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I don't think so. I found myself lol'ing (as in actually laughing out loud) at the accuracy.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
For sarcasm sentences can be suffixed with /s I refuse to do this on Reddit. I long for a simpler time when it was literally impossible to tell who was being sarcastic and who is a genuine crazy person.

flumpcakes 4y ago

> 9. Capitalizing the first letter in a sentence will reveal where you are This one really surprises me, if someone contacted me without bothering to type a proper sentence I would just think they're an idiot. Everyone I know always starts a sentence with a capital letter, no matter the platform. They all know how to use the shift key. This isn't even gate keeping, people use slang all the time, it is basic English. News, books, articles, tutorials, emails, teams, share point... Everything I read every day has proper capitalization.

wafflemaker 4y ago
What about chatting or just shooting off one off messages? Isn't shift an overkill then?
- flumpcakes 4y ago
  Yeah, I think I should say that when a longer conversation is _ongoing_ then I think dropping capital letters and full stops is more natural as the conversation flows. If I am trying to communicate something or it's the first message then it's always capitalized with the usual punctuation. Maybe even a semi-colon if I am feeling listy.
tuxxi 4y ago
typing without capitalization can help to create a more informal, somewhat playful tone. same goes for slight misspellings or abbrs instead of spelling out the full word. its just another way to add a small amount of “tone”.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  My impression of people who write like that is that they're 9 years old and somehow made it on the big-boy Internet. Mostly because the content of messages written in that fashion gives that impression as well. It's sloppier than the average youtube comment.
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

antegamisou 4y ago

Am I on 2018 Buzzfeed right now? Refrain from upvoting dumb shit people.

bertman 4y ago
You should at least skim it, it's funny :)

mdhb 4y ago

Might be a bit of a boomer opinion but the thing that kept coming up for me as I was reading that was “damn, that’s a lot of social insecurity built in by default to almost every interaction and conversation”. Not all of it obviously and I don’t even think that’s strictly a Gen Z thing specifically (much of it could have been written about my mother for example) but JFC it sounds emotionally draining way to live your life.

dbspin 4y ago
I find this often meeting 'zoomers' in person. In contrast to the glued to the phone cliche, they're often enormously attentive, in an almost pained way. Incredibly careful in how they speak and - in accordance with the 'triggered' cliche - very easily upset or offended. Not only by transgression of their numerous linguistic prohibitions, but even misunderstandings about potential transgressions. The simplest way to explain it is they seem to assume bad faith, that things were ill intended, and that the worst interpretation something someone says is accurate. They seem to have grown up at a time of rapidly changing speech and behavioural codes, immersed in a culture that has harsh instantaneous judgement for their transgression. It seems like an extremely fraught and anxiety inducing way of being.
- groestl 4y ago
  > the worst interpretation something someone says is accurate Well, to give just a few examples: * The worst interpretation of a sentence said by politicians is usually accurate * In contractual law, the worst interpretation of a clause is the one you need to prepare for * In advertising, the absolute worst interpretation of a phrase is usually accurate * If you get a letter of recommendation, the worst interpretation is the intended one So you adapt to this world.
  - dbspin 4y ago
    All of those things have been true at least since the dawn of mass media in the early 20th century. I'm speaking about intergenerational change, and interpersonal interactions. Perhaps the difference is that we all now exist as though on the public stage. Either way, perceiving everyday interactions in that way is dispiriting and closes you off from people with different experiences and perspectives. It can make your everyday life - rather than just your online existence - a rigid, carefully managed echo-chamber.

a1371 4y ago

Some of these make a lot of sense, not just as a Gen Z thing, but overall adopting them shouldn't annoy anyone. I will continue ending my sentences with a full stop but maybe I'll start picking more expressive emojis than :)

Gigachad 4y ago
Go full boomer and send :-)
- Fatnino 4y ago
  :o)
  - FinnKuhn 4y ago
    Ö
    - rom-antics 4y ago
      Beautiful, and all this time I thought HN didn't render emojis
      - shagie 4y ago
        That's an uppercase O with an umlaut on it. I type this with 'option u shift o'. For example - https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara Sahara (arabiska: الصحراء الكبرى, aṣ-ṣaḥrā' al-kubra, "Den största öknen") You'll note the öknen there and if it was capitalized you'd have Öknen.
    - wellthisisgreat 4y ago
      =)
- heckelson 4y ago
  in the German speaking sphere we used to use ggg to mean laughing, and the more g-s, the harder you were laughing

forgotpwd16 4y ago

K, haha. :) Am I doing it right?

bitwize 4y ago

Not stated, but implicit: If you have an Android phone, throw it away. No one wants to see your green bubbles, and no one can see if you've seen their texts if you have an Android. Get an iPhone, like 90% of Gen Z. Or gtfo.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>no one can see if you've seen their texts if you have an Android. That sounds like a feature.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  You can disable that in iOS too.
mouse_ 4y ago
I don't wanna see people who hold brands above people, I'll stick with my Android. Though I must admit I do judge people with Samsung phones, simply for accepting the worst of both worlds.
Fatnino 4y ago
Who TF is still using sms (or whatever chimera its morphed into) in the year 2023? All, and I really do mean ALL, messages that arrive on my phone are over whatsapp, telegram or discord. The green/blue bubble thing is classist and problematic and bringing it up is frankly embarrassing.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > whatever chimera its morphed into Apple's Messages > Who TF is still using Americans
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    Counterpoint: I'm American.

ehnto 4y ago

The full stop thing has been around since IRC networks, or I imagine any quick-response short message platform. No one ever explicitly explains it or notes it, you just pick up on it. Same with the difference colours of laughter "lol, rofl, haha, hahaha, lmao, ha." They're all just laughing but I bet you had different ideas about how each of them feel. This happens with language at large, synonymous words pick up nuanced differences so that we can express ourselves better, they aren't codified they just spread naturally. I think for full stops, it's like the difference between familiar language and polite language. If you are too polite with a close friend you give off the impression that you're not close enough for casual language, which can be insulting.

airstrike 4y ago
:).
butler14 4y ago
Logged in to say the same; all of these have ultimately formed back in IRC days and have aged remarkably well since The only one that is new (and therefore annoying to me as an Old Internet Man) is the insistance of adding emojis into every sentence For a while I could guess someones approximate age because of it, but now some of my 40+ friends have started emojiing like a 14 year olds too
- aaron695 4y ago
  [dead]
- hollowcelery 4y ago
  Emojis are a more granular and expressive form of the more traditional lol, rofl, haha, :), :(. They’re a useful side channel for expressing tone.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    That isn't a feature though. As it means and renders completely different in different contexts and apps.

sdfjkl 4y ago

Wonderful.

devnullbrain 4y ago

Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a ponytail and a motorbike. If you find yourself finding smug, try looking at an old Reddit rage comic/4chan greentext/usenet flamewar, depending on your age.

IncRnd 4y ago
There's a lot more to gen z than was on this blog post, but what is there seems like a recipe for creating personality disorders.
- wafflemaker 4y ago
  pls elaborate. The blog post was very informative for me. Learning even more would be nice. If it's good I'll submit it to the blogpost's author as he asked for at the end of the blogpost.
  - yucky 4y ago
    Not using any punctuation and relying on pictograms instead of definable words, and then getting hung up on who (and how many people) respond to a social post, and in what way and with what timing? Holy shit, no wonder they're all so perpetually miserable.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. > - Socrates, 400 B.C. >Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a diadema and a peneia. > - the youth, 400 B.C. --- >The children now love the internet; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love reddit in place of blog posts. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer use facebook while their uncles still do. They contradict their parents, text before company, gobble up memes on TikTok, twerk, and tyrannize their teachers. > - boomers, 2023 A.D. >Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a ponytail and a motorbike. > - devnullbrain, 2023 A.D.

SunghoYahng 4y ago

[flagged]

notarobot123 4y ago
[flagged]
cj 4y ago
To be fair, when I was a teenager 20 years ago in the 2000's chatting on AIM or MSN Messenger: - Most people didn't capitalize - People used a blend of text and regular emojis - Acronyms were rampant... "sup", "nm", "wbu", "wyd", "brb", etc... - Many of the same rules applied re: use of periods, having different meanings for "okay" vs. "kk" vs. "ok" These rules started to form 20 years ago. Not new to this generation.

m3drano 4y ago

kay.

Havoc 4y ago

Stupid question perhaps, but how does one separate sentences without fullstops then?

dschuetz 4y ago
when you send
eschatology 4y ago
- Just send them as multiple lines or messages - Ending a sentence with period sounds overly serious for one-liner or short messages. If you write multiple sentences in a message it's still OK to use periods (though writing a long paragraph over multiple messages can also come off as serious, so ultimately it depends on the tone you want to convey in your message)
mirekrusin 4y ago
Everything there is to say is at most one sentence, it's twitter like "conversations" everywhere. If it's not funny after 3s of reading it's not worth their attention, that's why meme pictures are the best. I have a feeling many would have problems reading basic articles where their attention would scream about jumping paragraphs.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_dain_ 4y ago
the article doesn't get the rule quite right. if you're sending a message with more than one sentence in it, a full stop is fine. but on shorter messages, the end-of-sentence is implied by the end of the message, so putting in a full stop on top of that is redundant. it seems like you're putting extra emphasis on the ending part, and the implication is something like: "there will be no further discussion." so it can seem hostile. and this isn't a gen z thing. it's just how instant messaging has worked forever.
FinnKuhn 4y ago
The rule should have been to not use a full stop for the last sentence. You still need them to separate your sentences (unless you send them as separate messages)

kavaruka 4y ago

this is not gen Z, but late millennials

rendall 4y ago
This. The younguns in your chats do not use many emojis.

hamasho 4y ago

I think emojis are an objectively better communication tool. You can pack more emotion and nuances in emojis with much fewer characters. Yet I hate when I see them... Probably because I'm getting older and becoming less tolerant of young culture. Sad Edit: I added a few emojis in the original message, but it seems automatically removed—another nice thing for hacker news.

tjoff 4y ago
Not really, they mean totally different things to different generations etc. and to add to that depending on your app and system they render completely different as to change the entire meaning. And that is before taking into account totally arbitrary shortcuts and meanings are introduced in various communities. As a communication tool within a tight group, sure. But outside that emojis are pretty darn bad. Unless you stick to the subset that pretty closely maps to ascii smileys.
silveroriole 4y ago
I’ve seen emojis completely banned on some codes of conduct because of potential offence. The OK hand symbol, the basic smiley face, or using the white skin tone on Slack could all be seen as hostile by some groups of people. Yeah it’s a bit crazy but this is one of the necessities of inviting lots of diverse groups of different ages and backgrounds to work together - there’s less of a base of shared communication and more risk of angering others, so communication must become more formal and defensive (at least until people establish good will with each other).

demindiro 4y ago

Meanwhile I've never encountered these "netiquettes" whoever I'm talking to. Perhaps every generation isn't a monoculture.

cal85 4y ago
Yep, these kind of articles are nonsense clickbait. The idea that there’s a special GenZ rule about full stops is bullshit. It’s all just tone and context. If you’re texting someone who evidently likes ending every message with a full stop, you obviously aren’t going to assume every single message is insulting (unless you’re an idiot or very paranoid). If you’re texting with someone who never uses full stops but then they suddenly use one at the end of a message and the message is kind of abrupt (like if it’s refusing a request) then it might feel kind of ‘firm’. This is something any intelligent/sensitive person, at any age, could pick up on, or not. It’s nothing to do with GenZ. It’s been this way since the start of internet messaging. It’s just recently become a dumb meme that fills column inches in newspapers because it creates a confused talking point where boomers etc are supposed to be aghast that they’ve been accidentally offending GenZ people by using full stops. It’s just dumb, dumb, dumb.

toastal 4y ago

For me, one of the biggest indicators that someone is from a generation older than my own is seeing two spaces after a period.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Or if their email font is something other than default. Comic Sans means they’re 55~60 and up.

scotty79 4y ago

So many of this rules feel like coddling other person's anxiety through obligatory reciprocation. Social media platforms approve.

mingus88 4y ago
That’s a great way of putting it An entire generation has been trained by Mark Zuckerberg to boost engagement on his properties
xboxnolifes 4y ago
Coddling other people's [issues] just sounds like any other social norms to me.
- mlindner 4y ago
  No that's not a recipe for healthy relationships. A healthy relationship is where you excuse others accidental faux pas in the interest of maintaining a good relationship. Only if they become highly offensive do you consider breaking off relations. That's how social norms work.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    I'm not talking about faux pas. I'm talking about the things you're expected to do, or not do, for the sake of managing the emotions of others.
    - mlindner 4y ago
      People don't normally manage the emotions of others (other than maybe a hysterical girlfriend). At least it's not something I've ever done.

plaguepilled 4y ago

I think it's implicit, but in case anyone didn't pick up on this, these tips are HIGHLY group dependent, which is roughly equivalent to being dependent on what app you use.

proto-n 4y ago

I'm far from gen z, but I spent a lot of time communicating through chat in the past ~20 years, and I've gotta say, to me, most of this is not "Gen Z" stuff, but "chat native" stuff. It becomes pretty obvious pretty soon when somebody doesn't really know the (for lack of a better word) language of these small nuances and a bunch of others, like message length, timings, etc. It's not done to be edgy, or to fit in, or anything like that. Its different tones in text. If the other party doesn't speak this language, then the communication becomes very literal, very formal. Kind of like how someone who is oblivious to social cues comes across in spoken conversations, only without the stigma, as its quite normal to not know this stuff. But it's much harder to 'feel' the other person.

gonehome 4y ago
A lot of it isn’t just chat native stuff imo. All the rules around instagram likes and reposting, the rules around “k”, that “:)” is passive aggressive etc. A lot of that feels juvenile which makes sense if it’s a gen z post. I’d guess it’ll stop once out of teens and early to mid twenties. I think when people are more secure/confident they stop doing as much meta analysis of this kind.
- rom-antics 4y ago
  k
  - brmgb 4y ago
    Yes, feeling offended about being called young is part of the package too. We know, we used to be.
neilv 4y ago
Yeah, much of these (or variations) applied to online live chat or async forums in the '90s. Though different venues had different conventions. And rules like in the article would all be easy to remember. What's not in the article is whether/what skills you'll need to develop to process all this information and noise. For example, I remember seeing a busy chat room for the first time in the mid-'90s, and there was so much people talking, and it was scrolling seemingly too fast to read. (Bonus: I was on a then-vintage green CRT terminal, HP 2392A, at that moment, so incomprehensible scrolling of symbols was not entirely unlike the Matrix visual.) But after some experience with the chat, it was no longer overwhelming. I could glance at the scrollage and have a sense of who was talking, what was being discussed, and possibly some meta of what was going on. And, for incoming messages, I could be tracking and selectively focusing among the often multiple concurrent threads of conversation. I suppose skills a bit analogous to that might include how to manage the many different online services today you have to be on today, applying critical processing to advertising/engagement feed algorithms, juggling all this inefficient stuff with more real-life things, etc.

spicyusername 4y ago

I was expecting a list of unrelatable norms, but I think these apply for most people who regularly use digital means of communication, regardless of age.

jasoneckert 4y ago

This deserves a new RFC - the original is outdated: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855

alanng 4y ago
not sure if some temporary generational convention can make it to RFC lol
mlindner 4y ago
Given that most of the stuff in the top article are the conversation of children that will quickly go away as they stop being children, I don't think it's worth having it be written down.

j1elo 4y ago

Very tangentially related: Instagram just started to roll out their new "status" line that shows up over your photo in everybody's message lists. It's like if MSN Messenger status were back again, and young people that I know are loving it :) I guess some ideas are fun no matter the generation. There are also older people who got to experience MSN Messenger, and are asking when the music status updates will come too! Meta/Fb just brought a decades-old staple into their app, and I find that amusing.

notacoward 4y ago

Fortunately, most Zoomers are very good at code switching. For example, I had a conversation with my daughter about laughing emoji vs. skull and crossbones ("ded") because I was seeing tons of online discourse about it. Her response was "It's not a big deal to me or any of my friends because we know you're old." Well, ouch, but also OK. So I still text in complete sentences etc. and she doesn't and it's all fine.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Very american reaction: reading too much into text messages and expecting superficial over friendliness. That's not a gen z thing. That's an entitle US social media projection.

nchie 4y ago
This is as accurate in Europe, and much of it has been for the last 15 years at the very least.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

LoveMortuus 4y ago

Irrelevant to the article, but it is a part of it, which made me think: "Disclaimer: theoretically speaking I’m a genZ. But I could never identify myself as one because I never quite know about most of the rules until recently. This is a gen Z edition, because gen Z practices these rules a lot, not because I’m one." I don't think the generation you're born in is something you identify with. Nor do I think that people "practice" the generational rules, as these "rules" are the result of their behaviour not something that one would practice/actively strive to do. As such, no matter what you do, that actions and behaviour is of the generation that you're born into. Example: You don't choose your parents, nor do you choose your siblings. If most of your siblings engage in daily running but you don't, saying that you don't identify as a child of you parents because children of your parents engage in daily running, is a bit of a backwards to the objective truth. (I can't think of a better way to put it into words, but I hope that fellow thinkers can see the logic that I'm trying to explain.) Maybe something like this: It is illogical to define yourself by the actions of others. Or: The actions of others, front define who you are. tl;dr: You are GenZ not because of what you do. But because what you do, is done by GenZ. Edit: You are not a man because you do manly things. Things are manly because a man does them.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

I deliberately violate most of these to filter out people who aren't worth my time, lqtm.

0x008 4y ago

None of this is new to me. I can totally identify with most of the gotchats presented in the article. I am far from being a Gen Z. If you were actually active on irc or icq, msn, aol (which are even explecitly mentioned in the blog post!) you know all this.

lleb97a 4y ago

It only just occurred to me that I finish every sentence with a . While no one I'm talking to does.

retrac 4y ago

Prognostication over the presence or absence of a single punctuation point seems like a problem for the reader. It assumes the author has the same background and understanding of these fine points that the reader does. This is probably an unreasonable assumption. I used to look for these shibboleths and hidden implications from minor stylistic issues. It's a bad habit. It often does reveal much. But it also tends to apophenia - seeing patterns that are not there. And it's so fuzzy that preconception tends to dominate. (You only worry about the abruptness of 'K.' if you're already worried about what they think of you.) As a writer, try to follow the style your audience expects. That advice applies to informal personal communications. But don't engage heavily in this practice as a reader. It can be counterproductive to communication.

rib3ye 4y ago

> I never thought of this until a friend asked "Were you outside when texting me?" The only thing that surprised me was that "outside" simply means "outside your home" now.

elteto 4y ago

Honestly, I can’t keep up with so much implied context about everything I type. It sounds exhausting.

dav_Oz 4y ago

To be fair given the context of snapchatting, tiktoking, voicemessaging, online dating [... stories, filters ...] written text is simply demoted to snippets of additional information/expressiveness. Sentence-s, well structured sentences (with it punctuation marks and capitalization) are in this context like evoking latin phrases let alone a fortiori whole paragraphs. If one takes chatgpt into the equation writing essays will be as calculating without a calculator for the next adolescent generation and used mainly as intimidation given the current education system - or preferably a playful approach at pattern recognition emerging from formal rules conveying abstract concepts.

maximus-decimus 4y ago

> Your friend texts you "I am happy for you." --> Highly likely they hate you and even wish the worst for you, but they have to text anyway cuz every friend in the group is doing so. People must really think I hate them lol.

idk1 4y ago

Total side thought - people capitalizing letters at the start of sentences because they're on mobile and not because they're on a laptop, would be a fantastic clue in a detective novel to flag up what device someone is sending messages with.

braingenious 4y ago

> I was born a couple of years before the golden era of Yahoo Chat Wouldn’t this make the author a millennial?

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
Yahoo chat was most popular from about 2002-2004, so no.
- braingenious 4y ago
  Ah that makes sense. I guess I’ll still confused about the talk of Yahoo messenger along with this: >As I’m stepping into my late 20s… What is Gen Z? My rule of thumb has been “people that definitely don’t remember 9/11” to distinguish between two very different generations.
  - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
    Someone born in 1998 would be entering the later half of their 20s this year. Gen Z is generally said to begin in 1997.
    - braingenious 4y ago
      Oh ok! I suppose that makes sense, thanks!

jacooper 4y ago

I'm gonna zooming away laughing because i basically don't use any zoomer social media.

navjack27 4y ago

My only impression after reading this is that gen z must be filled with anxiety constantly. My stomach hurts. Why are they like this? Why are they making so many negative assumptions about the other participant in a conversation? Why is everything malicious?

ravagat 4y ago

This is really funny. Some things I understand and some I find just foolish. Thanks for sharing

thefz 4y ago

Why is this garbage on HN?

HumanReadable 4y ago
because it's incredibly interesting

intel_brain 4y ago

nobody should play along with this bullshit. grow up. This is just some stupid kids, who have all time to "feel" things.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

> But do NOT ever send :) or Is this a thing now? Smileys are bad?