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> I was born a couple of years before the golden era of Yahoo Chat Wouldn’t this make the author a millennial?
Yahoo chat was most popular from about 2002-2004, so no.
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.
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I think you hit the nail on the head - at a certain point caring about every single rule isn’t effective or is actually net less effective. On HN I’ll use correct punctuation, grammar, and a wider set of vocabulary because there’s a good chance my message will come across more clearly. For general emails, I’ll write with simpler language because it’s very much a get-in-get-out activity especially with more senior sta…
> at a certain point caring about every single rule isn’t effective or is actually net less effective My point is the exact opposite though: I've been writing like this for all of my life, for at least 40 years, to write like I don't care I need to actually think about it and put a lot more effort into it, because it feels unnatural, looks wrong and makes me immediately doubt of the quality of the content I produced.…
I didn't learn this lesson the hard way until I was past my mid-20s. When you write something for others, it's far better to optimize for them rather than for yourself. Let's say you spend twice as much time writing something in an 'odd' way, but it gets your 50% more reach or alignment or funding. That's probably actually a great use of your time.
> So, to me, your explanation of why you don't do it sounds like "look at me, I don't follow rules because we are all smart here, right guys? ... right?".
It's not about being contrarian, it's about the tradeoff. Tone is incredibly important in most situations.
When you write with perfect grammar and punctuation, most people don't know how to read into the nuance. Happy? Joyful? Pleased? Content? There's very little, if any, common understanding of the intensity or undertone in those adjectives. Imagine you're working with a new PM and he tells you the team's progress is 'acceptable.' What does that mean exactly? Is he happy with it? Is he mildly annoyed? Does he feel like things are off track and actually wants to talk more?
So how do we build this common understanding? It turns out most people have actually already built up a language with their friends! Through texts/DMs/etc. So when that language is ported over to a work context, most people immediately grasp it.
You can conform to the world or the world can conform to you. <-- A sentence where tone would be helpful.
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Yahoo chat was most popular from about 2002-2004, so no.
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.
Gen Z is generally said to begin in 1997.
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…
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 nua…
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I work with a lot of people from abroad, where English isn't their first language. I also have a lot of friends who are foreign too. Trying to read into the "tone" is pointless. Simple sentences, with punctuation and grammar goes a long way. A benefit of not having tone imbued as some intangible quality of how a sentence is written down makes it very easy to communicate with them. If they are pissed off, they just sa…
I work with the exact same setup and demographics across the globe, from Eastern Europe to China to India to Japan to the US to South America. These aren't US specific Gen-Z rules, these are quite global. This is happening far outside the scope you're limiting it to, and it matters.
Given that almost all of these are English-specific or at least european language specific, no that is completely false.
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A point well worth making - every generation assumes it’s more progressive than the last, but that’s not always the case.
More moral , which may be more progressive or more prohibitions depending on why you think your parents were wrong.
So many of this rules feel like coddling other person's anxiety through obligatory reciprocation. Social media platforms approve.
Coddling other people's [issues] just sounds like any other social norms to me.
This deserves a new RFC - the original is outdated: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855