2y ago

Why don’t Lemmings capitalize the beginning of each letter in their title for their posts?

I would assume people would capitalize their titles in posts since that’s the standard pretty much anywhere else like on YouTube or news sites, and that’s what you learn to do in school. Why is it only different on forum platforms like Lemmy or Reddit?

20 comments

Because People Often Don’t Know How To Write A Concise Succinct Title And It’s Annoying To Read A Long Badly Written Title In Title Case
- Or even worse, a capital to start each word.
  At least it's not all uppercase.
- I hate this comment so much!

there is a strong mistrust of capitalism here on lemmy. don't let big letter dictate how you type.
power to the little letters!

let'sSwitch overTo camelCase!
- youreDoingItWrongItsWrittenWithoutAnySpacesJustLikeImDoingRightNowGodDammitIHateThis!

Because they're more like headlines than book titles.

A real title, one that you would typically capitalize the first letter of each word, does not have to be a sentence and often isn't. But many "titles" on forums like this are really sentences which capture the whole essence of what's being asked or stated, like your "title" does. As I browsed my "front page" (for lack of a better term) just now, indeed I found that titles followed that rule.
- Oh, so they’re basically just used as summary lines instead of titles?
  
  Exactly. Often the title is longer than the text of the post, and may even just say "title".

I dont think there is any rule or requirement to follow proper grammar on Lemmy, or the internet for that matter. It would be nice, but is not likely to happen.
- How is language supposed to evolve if we just stick to what's "proper" all the time. As long as it makes sense and conveys the message well, what is the difference?

Title case isn't universal. If someone learned a different style in school or college, say APA, titles may actually take sentence case.
- Or some of us are just lazy.

My guess is the more casual nature of the communication going on. It's less formal than putting in the effort of creating a published work like an article or video. Here you can just put the words in a box and hit go, your content is on the internet. Articles and videos require more time and effort to put together, so it would make sense to me for those to appear more formal, even if the content isn't the most serious.