Teens adopt “typing quirks” on forums as a form of self expression.
Typing quirks make their way into inappropriate contexts, such as extended discussions and flame wars, and become a laughing stock/sign of annoying person.
Typing quirks become socially unacceptable and mostly die out, their self expression function replaced by things like post formatting and decoration.
That’s it for a while. Until.
Extremely popular multimedia webcomic Homestuck implements typing quirks into it’s narrative, for the effect of depicting annoying teens expressing themselves. This is a fine implementation and serves the narrative for its intended effect.
Homestuck fans adopt “typing quirks” on social media as a form of fandom and self expression.
Typing quirks make their way into inappropriate contexts, such as discourse and callouts, and become a laughing stock/sign of annoying person.
Typing quirks don’t die out, as they are a sign of fandom and their is no other Homestuck-fan equivalent to replace them.
People unfamiliar with Homestuck, who see typing quirks out of context, go “hey that’s cool” and join in.
Typing quirks, unfortunately, return.
Conclusion:
There is an alternative timeline where typing quirks died 20 years ago, no popular webcomic brought them back and nobody remembers them.
Seeing typing quirks making the jump to video as speech affects in Tiktoks is, to put it nicely, bizarre.
Post formatting persists to this day and remains freaking epic.
