I think it's become a bit of a cliche/clique'y thing amongst a certain population. I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??) but I first encountered it in Silicon Valley. The Collison brothers used to love doing it, as did Altman. I feel it projects a kind of stream-of-thought with an aloofness, like "i dont care enough for correct form. language bends to my unique thoughts. read this if you like, i dont care lol".
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
As I understand it the root was people using the iPhone with autocorrect turned off. That’s how someone from the tumblr emo crowd (where it was definitely prevalent!) explained it to me, and the reason was because there was a lot of culture specific terminology used (including deliberate misspellings of words) that was difficult if autocorrect was switched on.
By extension you can see how that could also apply to tech.
This is not really anything new, back in AIM and SMS messaging days, people would type "wuu2" or "whats up" to a friend, but to express the same idea in an email, you would probably be sending some variant of "What are you up to?"
There is massively different subtext between the two. Autocapitalization and autocorrect represents a limit on the subtextual bandwidth you can communicate along with a message. Restrictions on subtextual bandwith are not ideal when your generation relies on text-based communication for evermore intimate interactions - that "whats up" message might be the start of you asking someone out on a date, I don't want it formatted the same way as a message I would send my boss.
I've always wondered what the point of capital letters even is? It doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile to the language. You need to learn 26 extra shapes, and then some arbitrary rules for when to use the majuscule. But if you never heard of capital letters, nobody will be confused by what you wrote.
They make scanning and reading text easier since they make jumping to the end/start of sentences easier. When you read your eyes are constantly jumping ahead and even backwards. The capital letters help you land quickly back at significant positions in the text since they are associated with boundaries in logical clauses.
If that were the point, why does English capitalize proper nouns? That would seem to complicate finding the start of a sentence. Besides, you have periods, exclamation points, and question marks at the ends of sentences anyway.
In German even ordinary nouns are capitalized, making it even less easy to find the capital at the start of a sentence.
1. Dots are tiny and are hard to see. A capital letter is a more visible indicator of the start of the sentence.
2. English barely uses any punctuation (vs. Russian) therefore making adherence to readability rules even more important. Paragraphs are also nicer to read vs. trying to read a wall of text.
