> I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. [...] Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof.

Maybe something in that direction, but OTOH maybe not quite: I just think it's counterproductive if by running with one's idea, one also actively antagonizes people with it. And Kragen's way of advocating the "Long Now" perspective comes off, at least to me (and apparently at least a few other posters), as equally disrupting to fluent reading as people advocating for other new perspectives while demonstrating their "non-conformist" creds by writing in lower-case-only, skipping punctuation, ignoring (or, likely, more often just not knowing...) the rules of grammar or spelling. (Admittedly, not equally as bad as the arseholes doing all of those at once; just in that direction.) That feels likely to put as many or more people off one's message as it wins converts, so recommending them to drop it was really just honest advice for the good of their own cause. (At least originally, before they apparently confessed to not actually having a cause but just be trolling.)

IOW, TL;DR: Not so much "must come with social proof" as that this seems in practice to be disproving / having disproved itself; while not necessarily as to the validity of the concept itself, but as an effective method of advocacy.

> > the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

> That hasn't changed in this interval.

Yeah, I was only speculating about why a quirky way to write numbers, specifically, comes off as innumerate and might therefore be seen as (approaching-)equally annoying here as bad spelling / grammar / punctuation / capitalisation is elsewhere, in other below-average-illiterate corners of the 'Net.