Unfortunately it has become quite common on HN already.

It comes from people growing up on smartphone chats where the kids apparently don’t care to press Shift.

I've already written an extension that filters these comments intelligently. (E.g., quotes are ignored but if the rest of the body is all lowercase it is collapsed.)

have you shared it anywhere?

I plan to at some point, it's part of a bigger extension I created for myself to filter out minor annoyances and I'd have to strip out/modify things other people probably wouldn't want (such as filtering of "new age" TLDs like ".pizza" and whatnot).

What’s weird though is that modern OSes often auto-capitalize the first letter of a sentence, so it actually takes more effort to deliberately type in all-lowercase.

Only mobile does that in my experience - you can tell what platform people send discord messages on based on this usually

simple toggle to disable it permanently

my reasoning is that i don’t want identifiable markers for what device im writing from. so all auto-* (capitalization, correct, etc.) features are disabled so that i have raw input

Being part of the minority that disables those things (and then admitting to it in public) provides a lot more analytical signal than you’re aware of. That’s a remarkably poor reason to disrespect your readers.

i don't care about the 'analytical signal'. the purpose is people can't tell if im writing a (discord, slack, etc.) message from my phone or laptop or desktop, and it works for that

It's already a trend. It's been for at least a decade. I'm surprised people here never noticed it...