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 feel like auto correct and voice to text aren’t as good as they used to be. AI, laziness, I’m more of an idiot not sure who to blame.
My older friend and i were talking about this a about 6 months ago. We both are convinced auto correct functions are getting worse. I suspect AI injection into the function somehow, but tin foil hat me also thinks it’s strategy to force more people to use microphone. Seems way more valuable to data miners
I think you’re onto something there.
Whats that futurama meme? I dont know if i should be happy that if im correct or angry that im not wrong?
Sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
For me auto correct has a BIG problem when I miss a dubbel consonant. It will start suggesting words that doesn’t have a single letter in common with what I’m trying to spell, it will suggest completely wrong words and it will even suggest nonsensical words that doesn’t exist. Everything except the exact word I have spelt, but with two s instead of one.
Like yesterday I was trying to spell I believe it was “Necessary” but I had spelt “nesesary” and it was like did you mean “Acceptances” “approval” “appel” “sope” “opposition” “operation” “passport” like that isn’t even close to what I’m am trying to type.
So I can completely believe auto correct have gotten worse and AI dose seem like a likely suspect.
Especially the times when I completely don’t know what I am trying to spell but it gets that “Trioqulationitasitq” is supposed to be “tribulation”
I don’t know how in the world it can do that but think nesesary is supposed to be approval.
Oooh good tip, ill have to start paying attention to that
You are going crazy. I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn’t a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it’s probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.
OP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
My guess is it’s just the frequency illusion, because they’re also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’) are from folks who don’t read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they’ve (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.
No they haven’t changed at all. I’ve been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me. I’m also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn’t even share the Latin alphabet
Well I guess I don’t know the timing but I wouldn’t be surprised it Lemmy was it - there are a bunch of non-native English speakers here
Are you fucking dense? I just told you that I’m also ESL, I don’t make such typos, it’s no excuse at all and makes it make not an iota more sense than saying the pigs are flying hence people’s spelling fell off a fucking cliff.
Lemmy is def not it, I moved here a year or more ago, the spelling has gotten very bad very recently and I only use this platform pretty much and this is where I’ve seen it the most by far.
Idk I swear to god it wasn’t this bad like 6 months ago, nevermind 10 years ago. Again, I’m not talking about formality or punctuation, but basic grammar like spelling which as you said should be taken care of by autocorrect and I did notice an improvement sometimes around the mid-2010s, but very recently there’s been a noticeable decline, at least in my opinion.
What possible cause could there be for lots of people to suddenly start spelling worse? Wait, this isn’t another of those ‘smart phones are making us dumb!’ posts is it? Cause people have said that about pretty much every invention since the printing press. It’s probably just the frequency illusion, where you notice something for no particular reason and then start seeing it everywhere, especially if you’re only noticing changes over the period of a few months. Spelling was every bit as bad in 1995 as it is in 2025. Maybe worse due to the lack of access to spell-checking, auto-correct, online dictionaries, etc, and you can notice it especially in people who don’t read much (which is how you get spellings like ‘itsplain’ instead of ‘explain’, it seems like they’re guessing based on what they’ve (mis)heard instead of seeing it on the page/screen) even long before smart phones were a thing.
Not saying it is, but accidental, quality degrading, changes to a major/prevalent auto-correct system could result in what OP is claiming. Just to give an example.
This is it. Gboard autocorrect has felt shittier to me recently as well, so I turned it off. I wonder if there’s been any changes.
That’s a fair point, I was just wondering if they had a specific theory as to why it suddenly changed since they were asserting that it had.
No I’m not implying any conclusion with my post. Smartphones actually massively improved grammar on the internet through the joys of autocorrect in my experience
Ah, fair enough. My bad for assuming.
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.
Yep it’s always been shit.
I blame these f’ing phone keyboards and autocorrect. I can’t see what I am touching, I can’t feel it, there’s no feedback, and I have to look up while I type. Whoever came up with approach deserves… A bad case of indigestion.
I would not be surprised if autocorrect was a major culprit along with phone keyboards. You can type something correctly and have autocorrect make it wrong. It’s also super easy to get the wrong letter if you have normal sized hands and are typing on a phone keyboard. I have turned autocorrect completely off and am significantly less error prone as a result.
I frequently decide against correcting an error if I think my intention is clear, and I am in a hurry. I don’t really care what strangers on the internet think of my editing skills.
I hate this. For instance, using u instead of you, autocorrect often turns it to I. It also will fucking “correct” your to you’re when you typed your on purpose. I’m ready to just turn it off. It fucks up my posts, texts, emails all the time. I don’t have this issue on my laptop.
I think you mean it will ducking correct…
I turned mine off completely because it has bo comprehension of when an apostrophe is appropriate in front of the letter s. Forever making words possessive that were intended to be plural. Apostrophes do not mean “look out, here comes an s.”
Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.
Most of the people you interact with online aren’t native English speakers.
I get the feeling it’s the native speakers who are the worst offenders. The ones using English as a second language at the very least made an effort to learn the language.
EDIT: deleted by thought police mob.
Lmao.
What an awful individual.
Not to mention I wrote my comment before anyone else.
It’s not just spelling, even online people don’t even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It’s maddening, honestly.
I absolutely loathe posts that just say something like “This dog.”
This dog WHAT, bozo.
This dog murdered my family okay it is a really bad dog and it’s evil and bad but also really cute so idk if I can hold a grudge against it but what it can hold against me is the gun that it has pressed to my temple because it has forbidden me from using any punctuation in this run-on paragraph
I swear to god working in an engineering field for the past 10 years or so has dramatically changed my grammar. Do you know who has the absolute worst grammar and spelling of anyone I’ve ever met? My boss. “First 2 channels shoul dBe woired for 0-10vDC” was a note he left on my desk yesterday. Do you know who’s the smartest person I’ve ever met when it comes to electrical? Also my boss.
It’s never a 1 to 1 comparison of intelligence fwiw. Everyone in this field spits out emails in half-cobbled together sentences and phrases and it just works somehow. When I type out multiple paragraphs and overexplain things, half the time they’ll just come down to the shop to talk instead.
But yeah I have realized that this will bleed out into the rest of my communication haha. I’ll look back at texts I send quickly to my fiance and see that I’m skipping words or saying shit wrong. Oh well, the ideas are communicated just as well most the time.
Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.
Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.
This was going to my answer as well. While spelling on the internet is pretty bad, English isn’t the primary language of many people on Lemmy.
I’ve noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I’ve had no issue spelling I’ve lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.
In my case, autocowreck is the main reason for incorrect spelling and grammar.
wu7 u m34n, m8? 4lw4y5 b33n l1k3 d15. /s
Could be people using a second language like others have mentioned. Another thing could be British vs US english. Webster changed how words were spelt in the early 20th centry to make them more phonetic for Americans, i.e. “colour” -> “color”
I’m also second language lol, I’d never do this, I learned how to write English before I knew how to speak it.
Yeah counterintuitively there are a lot of people who learn English as a 2nd language who have better grammar than native speakers because they actually learn the rules.
My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I’ve gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety
my phone corrects “the” to “Tue”. Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
My phones autocorrect has been garbage recently. I feel like a few years ago, it was much better at predicting what I meant to type, and I could easily edit on mobile using the suggested corrections. But now it is worse. Even with words or names I use all the time.
Ditto. My older phone (Lineage 17) doesn’t have this problem, compared to my current (Lineage 20)
Mine autocorrects “the” to “ther” sometimes. Not even a damn word.
See, I legitimately can’t even tell if you’re trolling or not.
I turned off autocorrect because it was changing valid words into other words. Having an obvious typo is preferable to changing the meaning completely, which happened enough times for me to notice.
