> First time I've seen it. It will be interesting to see if that trends.

It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It dates back to at least a decade. It's mostly used to signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for punctuation or syntax.

It already trends among a certain generation of people.

I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading of mid/long form text is unwelcome.