Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?

You are going crazy. I've been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn't a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it's probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.
- OP’s browsing habits likely recently changed to a place on the web with more English as a second language users. Those kinds of misspellings are pretty common with people who learned a lot of their English from streaming Youtube and other online shows
  
  It’s the opposite. People learning English as a second language are typically much better spellers. Only a native speaker would misspell extreme that way
  
  I've always experienced the opposite - native English speakers are horrible at spelling because they don't have to put any effort into comprehending the language, vs non-native speakers who frequently have to take ESL tests for either academia, work, or immigration, and therefore had more exposure to spelling practice.
  
  My guess is it's just the frequency illusion, because they're also super common among Americans who have only ever spoken English from birth. My theory is that these types of misspellings (like 'itsplain' instead of 'explain') are from folks who don't read a lot and therefore seem to be guessing on spelling based on what they've (mis)heard rather than having seen it on the page/screen enough to notice the correct spelling.
  
  No they haven't changed at all. I've been using mostly Lemmy as my one and only SM for most of the past year and this is a very new phenomenon to me. I'm also not a native English speaker at all, my mother tongue doesn't even share the Latin alphabet
- Idk I swear to god it wasn't this bad like 6 months ago, nevermind 10 years ago. Again, I'm not talking about formality or punctuation, but basic grammar like spelling which as you said should be taken care of by autocorrect and I did notice an improvement sometimes around the mid-2010s, but very recently there's been a noticeable decline, at least in my opinion.
  
  What possible cause could there be for lots of people to suddenly start spelling worse? Wait, this isn't another of those 'smart phones are making us dumb!' posts is it? Cause people have said that about pretty much every invention since the printing press. It's probably just the frequency illusion, where you notice something for no particular reason and then start seeing it everywhere, especially if you're only noticing changes over the period of a few months. Spelling was every bit as bad in 1995 as it is in 2025. Maybe worse due to the lack of access to spell-checking, auto-correct, online dictionaries, etc, and you can notice it especially in people who don't read much (which is how you get spellings like 'itsplain' instead of 'explain', it seems like they're guessing based on what they've (mis)heard instead of seeing it on the page/screen) even long before smart phones were a thing.
- I've on the Internet for the same amount of time and it's gotten MUCH worse.
  
  I mean everybody has their own experience so I'm not gonna tell you you're wrong, but that's not been my experience.
  I spent more than 10 years playing text-based roleplaying games (MUSHes) from like ~1993 on, and even people who had multiple scenes a day that were well beyond short story length were frequently just god-awful at spelling. I had a lot of bad habits I picked up from back then that I've had to break, some of which (misspelling 'separate' as 'seperate', f.ex) that still get me sometimes. So at the very least there has been no shortage of awful spelling in the early days of the internet.
  By the same token I now spend at least an hour or two a day reading lemmy, reddit, etc and usually several more playing video games where I should've been exposed to all this awful typing going on and I have not noticed an increase, much less one worthy of capital letters.
  So, I'm not saying it's impossible, just that as someone who has spent a significant portion of their life reading text on the internet it doesn't seem likely to me.
- Yep it’s always been shit.

No, I think you does have point, I've been sawing that, too.
- Look at Mr fancy pants here using punctuation like yer some kinda edumacated person of learneding
- I scenes it to scenes it many time. OP is rite is got extream. Happnd all the sudden to
- Youse*
  Et oak thoug we awl mess that juan.

Don't forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.
- True. Good point.
- Came here to say that.
- Yes yes you and many others have pointed this dumb take out already. I'm also a second language English speaker, and no one in my family even speaks English or ever has, and I'd never make a mistake like this.

My spelling and grammar are a lot worse when I type on my phone. I also accidentally a word.
I don't bother with correcting it since I don't care.

My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I've gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety
- my phone corrects "the" to "Tue". Thanks phone, exactly what I was going for apparently
  
  Mine autocorrects "the" to "ther" sometimes. Not even a damn word.
  
  My phones autocorrect has been garbage recently. I feel like a few years ago, it was much better at predicting what I meant to type, and I could easily edit on mobile using the suggested corrections. But now it is worse. Even with words or names I use all the time.
- See, I legitimately can't even tell if you're trolling or not.
  
  I turned off autocorrect because it was changing valid words into other words. Having an obvious typo is preferable to changing the meaning completely, which happened enough times for me to notice.

I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught "whole word reading" rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as "whole words" and eventually be able to read.
So, they can't actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.
When you can't read it's not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don't really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.
Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.
Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.
- This made me look up "whole word reading", and it just made me irrationally angry. To be fair, English isn't my native language and I don't have a recollection of learning how to read, but "whole word learning" sounds insane. But like... Why would you do that if you are using an alphabet?
- Phonics is dogshit and it's being phased out in favour of whole word reading here.
  You should not learn spelling by "sounding out" much of anything, you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelt.
  
  You might want to look at the latest research. Its not favorable after decades of data from "whole word" reading techniques education.
  you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelled.
  Thats the concept of "whole word", yes, but in practice it severely limits vocabulary and comprehension apparently. That real world data tells the tale.
  
  At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it's often enough that you can't read a whole word at once. From there, there's so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn't make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you're reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you've never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there's familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.
  Also
  spelt
  That is a grain spelled "spelt"

It's not a recent thing, but I would say there has been a decline over the last decade or so. Not only does it seem like spelling and grammar are getting worse but I feel it is much more likely these days to find comments defending improper English rather than correcting it.
I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
Maybe they had just come from dealing with large quantities of paper? Or enlarging a bunch of holes?
- Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for decades and spelling gets worse? I am shocked I tell you!
  Also: inb4 the "language evolves!" crowd arrives.
  
  Both are true.
  
  So true. People are likely being fucked up by poor autocorrect algos, as I noticed even mine messing up and turned it off outright, because I blind type like 89wpm on my phone anyway so I'm fine without it. Then they're defending it like ignorant fools that they are, reasoning backwards and perpetuating anti-intellectualism

It’s been awful for a while.
All the too/to/two or their/they’re/there kind of wreckage along with stuff like “for all intensive purposes”, “flee market”, or “diffuse the situation”.
There’s tons of writing like that everywhere. Wouldn’t be so bad if people learned when corrected, but I think most can’t be bothered.
My take is that people don’t read anymore along with probably an unhealthy dose of laziness and “gotta write all messed up to act cool” to boot.
Reading well-written books of any sort will help the mind fix how words go together and how they’re spelled. But today everyone reads everyone else’s shitty grammar, spelling, and whatever massacre of stylistic choices were made to stand out and look cool in the comment section of the youtube videos or tiktoks they just watched. That’s probably the extent of the reading they do.

It's not just spelling, even online people don't even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It's maddening, honestly.
- I absolutely loathe posts that just say something like "This dog."
  This dog WHAT, bozo.
  
  This dog murdered my family okay it is a really bad dog and it's evil and bad but also really cute so idk if I can hold a grudge against it but what it can hold against me is the gun that it has pressed to my temple because it has forbidden me from using any punctuation in this run-on paragraph

I've noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I've had no issue spelling I've lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.
- Brain damage from stress lol. I find myself occasionally typing "there" instead of "their" and have to catch myself. I always reread what I type before sending so I fix it before sending, but I never made this mistake before. Somehow, over the years, probably from stress of various kinds (and this dates back to pre-COVID), I began to process language aurally and less visually, so if it sounds close enough and I'm not really thinking about what I'm typing, I'll use the wrong word.
  I've never typed "payed" before, though, and I see that across Reddit increasingly. It's just crazy that that and "could/would of" have exploded over recent years.
  
  Sounds? You pronounce words as you type?

Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.
I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn't see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.

I blame these f'ing phone keyboards and autocorrect. I can't see what I am touching, I can't feel it, there's no feedback, and I have to look up while I type. Whoever came up with approach deserves... A bad case of indigestion.

I would not be surprised if autocorrect was a major culprit along with phone keyboards. You can type something correctly and have autocorrect make it wrong. It's also super easy to get the wrong letter if you have normal sized hands and are typing on a phone keyboard. I have turned autocorrect completely off and am significantly less error prone as a result.
I frequently decide against correcting an error if I think my intention is clear, and I am in a hurry. I don't really care what strangers on the internet think of my editing skills.
- I hate this. For instance, using u instead of you, autocorrect often turns it to I. It also will fucking "correct" your to you're when you typed your on purpose. I'm ready to just turn it off. It fucks up my posts, texts, emails all the time. I don't have this issue on my laptop.
  
  I think you mean it will ducking correct...
  I turned mine off completely because it has bo comprehension of when an apostrophe is appropriate in front of the letter s. Forever making words possessive that were intended to be plural. Apostrophes do not mean "look out, here comes an s."

Ayi wudnt sei its oful, jast difarent
- Been hitting the rum supply again, ye scallywag?

I no phone gudz mane.
No, but really typing on a glass slab sucks. The software sucks ass too and seemingly no OEM is interested in improving it or trying something new.
Android's spellchecker sucks at handling 2 languages at once so I gotta turn it off and rely on the keyboard's auto correct.
Both FUTO and Heliboard insist on not correcting obvious misspellings or change correct words to nonexistent ones.
I'm convinced we've gotten the maximum we can out of the touchscreen QWERTY format. EIther we get a new Blackberry KeyOne style device or we get some stenography-like software innovation that converts vibes to words, I dunno.
- I am pretty sure android is getting worse at correcting input and also changes words after the fact as you type, coupled with phones are awful to type on, results in this fucking mess we get now days.
- Big tech realised that touch screen keyboards are cheaper to manufacture (develop) than physical keyboards and persuaded everyone that touch screen keyboards are better. Absolutely not. Screw touch screen keyboards.

Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.
Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.
- This was going to my answer as well. While spelling on the internet is pretty bad, English isn’t the primary language of many people on Lemmy.

I think that it's mostly just Lemmy being less dominated by native English speakers. Many of those mistakes that seem baffling "make sense" in some other languages

I'm burnt out man. I just dont have the energy or the careth to be accurate or even care about a small thing.
- carrot*
  
  No, he just doesn't carrot all.

wu7 u m34n, m8? 4lw4y5 b33n l1k3 d15. /s
- wuseven u mthreefourncomma meightquestion mark fourlwfouryfive bthreethreen lonekthree donefivedot slashs
- I don't know what is concerning, me knowing how to read this, or being able to read this even when I am not from a sms generation (not that i am very youung, but where i live, sms was very expensive, so many people did not message untill we had internet based messengers)

You're not crazy. Nobody wants their grammar correcting; they lash out and call people who do that "grammar nazis" instead of thanking them for helping them improve. So they get to post whatever they like, and of course as more people see stuff spelt incorrectly they assume that's correct and use those errors themselves, but intentionally. And of course the dictionary writers realise they are descriptive, not proscriptive, so the argument "the dictionary says..." is voided.
Autocorrect is OK to an extent but it's not smart enough yet to understand what people are actually saying. So it gets switched off.
Also it is worth mentioning that English is a complex language with many inconsistencies. "extream" is incorrect, but "stream" isn't, and that "eam/eme" is pronounced the same way. So "extream" is at least understandable. It's similar to "ect" instead of "etc", which is commonly mispronounced as "ek-setera" so you can see why people think the C is after the E.
I used to try to help people a lot but just got a whole load of abuse back. These days I only query something if I genuinely can't grok what they're trying to say. Or I just ignore it. If the question is so badly garbled that I can't understand it I just assume they won't be able to understand may answer, which will probably be quite detailed.
- they won't be able to understand may answer
  I assume that "may" is an unintentional mistyping of "my", right?
  I definitely agree. I want to point out errors, but the issue is most people do not want errors to be pointed out and see it as nitpicking at best, or an act of aggression at worst.

Worse: it's common for the younger generation to reduce everything to three-letter, monosyllabic slang. "Mid" "on god" "no cap" there's an intellectual laziness that's trendy and it's getting worse with time.
- Bro didn't live during sms era.
  
  Are you sure?
- During the big wave of Among Us, it was also interesting to see "sus" become a popular term, probably because people don't know how to spell "suspisus".
  
  I think it's more that there's limited time to talk in the meetings.
  
  Oh

Most of the people you interact with online aren't native English speakers.
- I get the feeling it's the native speakers who are the worst offenders. The ones using English as a second language at the very least made an effort to learn the language.
- EDIT: deleted by thought police mob.
  
  Lmao.
  What an awful individual.
  Not to mention I wrote my comment before anyone else.

It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.

A majority have always been bad at spelling
- A majorrity have always been bad at spelllng
  
  Exactly

My older friend and i were talking about this a about 6 months ago. We both are convinced auto correct functions are getting worse. I suspect AI injection into the function somehow, but tin foil hat me also thinks it's strategy to force more people to use microphone. Seems way more valuable to data miners
- I think you're onto something there.
  
  Whats that futurama meme? I dont know if i should be happy that if im correct or angry that im not wrong?
- For me auto correct has a BIG problem when I miss a dubbel consonant. It will start suggesting words that doesn't have a single letter in common with what I'm trying to spell, it will suggest completely wrong words and it will even suggest nonsensical words that doesn't exist. Everything except the exact word I have spelt, but with two s instead of one.
  Like yesterday I was trying to spell I believe it was "Necessary" but I had spelt "nesesary" and it was like did you mean "Acceptances" "approval" "appel" "sope" "opposition" "operation" "passport" like that isn't even close to what I'm am trying to type.
  So I can completely believe auto correct have gotten worse and AI dose seem like a likely suspect.
  Especially the times when I completely don't know what I am trying to spell but it gets that "Trioqulationitasitq" is supposed to be "tribulation"
  I don't know how in the world it can do that but think nesesary is supposed to be approval.
  
  Oooh good tip, ill have to start paying attention to that

Completely agree. I cringe on a regular basis. I never know if it’s “stylistic”, typos, laziness? Sentence structure has also gone for shit.

I make more spelling mistakes when autocorrect is on than when it's off (and every little update to the os seems to re-enable it 😬) because it constantly wants to change words that were spelled correctly, to a different word that doesn't fit the context.

Idk i ditnt notise anyting unujual

I, mean its only. Natural that weerd thangs criep into comments here und their
But it's been something increasing over time. Some of it is people just not paying attention, some of it is them relying on autocorrect and not spending the time to check what gets autoed. But, a lot of it is that people can't spell for shit, and don't care that they can't.
And, to be fair, as long as the basic idea of what you're saying gets across, how much effort is required? In your example, extreme vs extream, while one is correct, they both sound the same, and they even read the same. So if a person is just approximating the sound of the word, and never ran across it, do they have an obligation to go looking?
Now, obviously, extreme would be an unusual word to never have seen in print since it was over used in marketing for a long time. I'd expect xtreme to be the misspelling to show up. But even with a word that over saturated, does it matter?
I say no, it doesn't really matter. Yeah, I'd still offer someone the correct spelling, but that's just as a point of conversation rather than any obligation they have to spend their time and energy on vocabulary and/or spelling. As long as they aren't giving me shit for having put in time and effort into mine, and it's close enough to guess; or they're willing to communicate about that they meant if it isn't easy to guess.
For real, it does make my brain scream at me when I run across it. But that's my problem, not theirs.
Seriously, not everyone cares enough to edit it up. Why should they?

Gen alpha hasn't really been taught how to spell and they think grammar is stupid.

The Android keyboard always worked well for me, but I don't trust them one bit. So I changed my phone keyboard into something that is worse at guessing what I'm trying to say, but I'm somewhat confident I am not being surveilled through it.
I started using it a month or two ago, and ever since I have started making a billion typos when writing on mobile.
Also, I guess the demography of the communities you're in matters. I think quite a few of us over here are not native speakers. Sometimes I'll also write with my keyboard set to the wrong language by accident, "leasing to all mines" of freaky autocorrects.

W3 g01ng b@ck 2 typ31ng 1n l33t?
- Y35! HAC4 TH3 PLAN3T!

If you’re talking about my messages, it’s because I swipe too fast and don’t check the message 9 times before posting. All sorts of weird nonsense slips through every day, some of which I edit later.
If you’re talking about how native English speakers spell, you’ll find all sorts of weird mistakes that seem to stem from the fact that English is pure chaos, and navigating this mess is about as easy as programming with a magnetized needle and a hard disk platter. The way I see it, mispronouncing every word in a consistent manner helps me remember how they are written. The trick is to use a consistent spelling system of another language to form an auditory memory of the spelling.
So in my mind, every word comes with three entries: what the word means, how it’s pronounced and how it’s written. Memorizing a combination of letters is hard, but memorizing a funny sound that you can later decrypt back to a sequence of letters is easier. That connection has to be 100% consistent, which is exactly what English can’t offer, but many other languages come pretty close.
If your first language happens to have a fairly consistent spelling system, you can totally use it to memorize how English words are spelled. Native English speakers are obviously completely screwed, and that’s why spelling bees are a thing and why this post exists.
- How is swipe writing supposed to work? I've never seen it in action by someone IRL, and whenever I've tried it myself, it seemed to be way too much hassle vs just typing shit and using predicts to auto complete.
  
  What I like to call "glide texting" is when (on a phone) you put your finger on the first letter and drag your finger to the next letter and the next and so on without lifting your finger until you reach the last letter. Letters that are repeated (like in too) are just treated as one letter for this. Your phone will then "guess" what word could be represented by "what you just drew" and give you some options above the keyboard (3 for my phone) for alternatives in case things were guessed wrong. This requires your keyboard to support that feature (and the basic Android keyboard does support it). On earlier phones, the SwiftKey keyboard was used to do such things (that company was later on purchased by Microsoft by the way).
  There are two issues I want to highlight with regards to glide texting.
  First is where several words can be represented by one "glide text". I feel (can't prove) that the phone does use the context of your sentence to assist with word selection. However, you sometimes have to be annoyed and type out words letter by letter to get things entered.
  The second issue is that your phone learns from you and from the "intelligent population". If you type in a wrong spelling (perhaps by not entering in the last letter) then your phone "learns" that word and starts to use it when glide texting. Second is when a person glide texts incorrectly (for "hello", instead of swiping over HELO they swipe over GWKO or BELO or something like that) and then that person taps the "Hello" entry for what that glide should mean. Now the phone starts thinking glide texts for a specific word (from anyone in the world) must mean some completely different word because the majority of people seem to indicate that.
  Still, glide texting is usually a faster way to enter text on the phone. That being said, issues can be quite interesting when they do appear.
  
  Swipe typing is the cursive of smartphones. I love it, it's so much faster than regular typing (for me at least). I didn't realize how uncommon it is until several people commented on me using it.

There's a strain of "cutesy" spelling going around where swapping vowels is somehow significant. I just put these people on the blocklist, they have nothing useful to say anyway.
- I hate those people with an unreasonable vehemence.

My phone is stupid and will automatically correct on its own to giggerish or to other words that makes no sense. That's why I do so many edits. I don't always catch the errors.
- This is the real cause. Tech peaked and has since gobe to dogshit monetization, ai-ification and ultimately idiocrification.
  Edit: point proven. Autocorrected gone to "gobe". WTF?
- The Samsung keyboard doesn't respond to tapping the word you want most of the time. They fixed it once and then broke it again during the next update

I make mistakes because my replies are often my stream-of-consciousness, and the primary review is mainly to make sure I even want to reply to the comment at all. I don't use autocorrect so my fingers slip frequently.
If you look through my comment history, a good chunk are edited because I catch more grammatical errors in my comment after I post. I suppose most others don't bother.

I swear to god working in an engineering field for the past 10 years or so has dramatically changed my grammar. Do you know who has the absolute worst grammar and spelling of anyone I've ever met? My boss. "First 2 channels shoul dBe woired for 0-10vDC" was a note he left on my desk yesterday. Do you know who's the smartest person I've ever met when it comes to electrical? Also my boss.
It's never a 1 to 1 comparison of intelligence fwiw. Everyone in this field spits out emails in half-cobbled together sentences and phrases and it just works somehow. When I type out multiple paragraphs and overexplain things, half the time they'll just come down to the shop to talk instead.
But yeah I have realized that this will bleed out into the rest of my communication haha. I'll look back at texts I send quickly to my fiance and see that I'm skipping words or saying shit wrong. Oh well, the ideas are communicated just as well most the time.

Mine has always been bad, but autocorrect seems to be bipolar as the years pass.

There's a few I've noticed in the last seven years or so - lots of Americans can't seem to conjugate "run". It results in horrible sentences like "I used to ran this game" or "I have ran this event before". No idea why that's happening but squirt those people with a plant mister.
It's even worse than people who don't finish the words they're writing "suppose to" and the like. In the brine with thee!
- The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I'm curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I'm dead.
  
  I'm always perplexed when I see porn videos with titles that use the continuous present rather than the simple present. One would have thought that the simple present would be the basic stuff for English as a second language, rather than the much less useful continuous present.

I'm not native English. It's imperfect English or writing in other language that not many would fully understand.
- Non natives can usually spell better than natives.

I have turned metrics off on my phone keyboard and I swear it fucks up my choices.

I think there are a few things happening.
More and more individuals are contributing to the Internet through social media rather than simply consuming. They are bringing their (lack of) spelling and grammar with them, resulting in the variety of mistakes you've noticed.
At the same time I have noticed more and more mistakes appearing in "professional" publications. I don't ever recall seeing a typo on an NPR website up until the past 1-2 years. Now I see grammatical and spelling mistakes almost everywhere.
I'm guessing it's a combination of laying off editors and using AI.
But at the end of the day, if a language isn't evolving, it's dead.

I feel like it's gotten better. I certainly don't miss the days of "definately". I feel like that one was everywhere. Its death is maybe the one good thing auto-correct did for the world.
- I still see "defiantly" on a regular basis.
  
  Yeah, a good example of auto-correct being - as is more typical - useless.

I make a ton of stupid spelling mistakes just because of typing on mobile 99% of the time. For some reason I CONSTANTLY miss the keys I'm looking for, or manage to press them in the wrong order somehow; swapping Ns with Ms, T with Y, R>T, B>N, inserting spaces too early, doubling up characters.
If i nevsr look up and jus tkeep typing, I end of with a garbled mess just liek this sentence is.
This can get much worse if I use the next word suggestions. I'll spot the suggestion I want, but continue to press the next letter; this changes what's being suggested, or just moves it to a different position (centered vs the two options to the side) but I still press where I first saw it which is now a totally different suggestion...
Lots and lots and lots of proof-reading. And I STILL fuck it up.
- Yeah it's so dumb, like we have amazing technology, yet the software is fucking terrible.
  For example with most keyboard you can have a heat map of where you hit each button. So you can clearly see where the buttons should most comfortable be. However I've never seen any keyboard that could ever make use of that data to morph the shape of the buttons to my patterns. It seems so obvious, otherwise why collect that data?
  Instead we keep making the same shitty keyboard over and over again. And big companies monitor all our keypresses because number must go up. And put dumb ass AI powered autocorrect that are trained on all data ever instead of my personal data. I swear that thing "corrects" the right word into the wrong word more often than the other way around.
  Somehow touchscreens and keyboard have also gotten worse. I remember my old IPhone 4 I could type so fast without errors. And that screen was fucking tiny. Maybe I'm just too old but modern phones make my hands hurt and I still have errors all the damn time.
  
  You might just be older. A number of keyboards do actually use that data but in the autocorrection phase. I think most people would hate it if the key sizes kept changing

No you aren’t getting crazy. I stopped double checking my spelling after Trump became president the first time. Clearly most people don’t mind bad spelling so why bother?
- I double check my writing because there are some "errors" that don't matter (I stopped caring about "me" versus "I") and then there are some errors that silently cause me to misinterpret the message
  Like as an analogy if I ask how much milk is left in the carton in the fridge
  "haf" I know you mean half, no big deal
  "three" I know you didn't read my question, frustrating but not the worst thing
  "full" but actually it was full three days ago when you last checked and this is stale information, and so I don't buy another carton, then we're out of milk because of a miscommunication
  You know?
- Because it's worth it to be better than they are and it fights entropy

I switched to Heliboard and the autocorrect just isn't as good as gboard. It's worth it for me for the privacy but I have to constantly reread my messages

Could be people using a second language like others have mentioned. Another thing could be British vs US english. Webster changed how words were spelt in the early 20th centry to make them more phonetic for Americans, i.e. "colour" -> "color"
- I'm also second language lol, I'd never do this, I learned how to write English before I knew how to speak it.
  
  Yeah counterintuitively there are a lot of people who learn English as a 2nd language who have better grammar than native speakers because they actually learn the rules.

I've noticed the same thing, including on stuff that should be spell checked like news articles. Its not even rare. I've also noticed my phone (current android) it has been making it nearly impossible to overrule errant spelling even if it is not correctly changing it.
Overall I believe its entirely the lack of proof reading. Please god I proof read this let it contain no errors.

Most of my stupid spelling mistakes, missing words, and other typing errors are because I developed the terrible habit of proofreading only in the instant between hitting the post button and the subsequent UI refresh. The better my lemmy host is running, the lower the readability of what I've posted.
I've also noticed that muscle memory does some strange stuff to my typing. Like in the first sentence of this comment I typed "instance" rather than "instant." I meant instant but, since I work with AWS 5 days a week, my fingers autopiloted instance because I type it much more often.

tze fone keebord iz wery smol
itz werry deefeekult tuu tipe vordz korrektly

recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.
- I've done LSD many times and while I've imagined impossible colours I could never imagine how that mistake might occur. Care to enlighten us?

I'm guilty of all these. I'm dyslexic and have a hard time spelling. At some point the personal dictionary on my phone learns words and I don't get the warning anymore.

My online grammar and spelling is like a drunkard has taken over my keyboard. Swiping is awful for accuracy

I know for me, I'm having more difficulty because of failing eyesight. If you can't see the word you can't perceive you've spelled it incorrectly.

Fuck the people who get simple words wrong. Our language is degrading as tikok and video shorts are on the rise and attention spans decline.
Soon enough people won't have the attention span to even write anymore.