alt Hacker NewsWow, I read the whole thing without noticing that.
But as someone who came of age in the AIM / ICQ / IRC days, it feels pretty normal. That's just how we wrote. I still fall into it by accident when the context is right and I'm not thinking about it (eg Slack at work). I hope youngsters aren't judging me for it.
we wrote like that because each message was a single sentence
if you wanted more than one sentence you sent one then wrote the other
it's painful to read longform
the victorians didn't give up on punctuation and regular english just because they had the telegraph