I’m seeing them everywhere. Not just on cheap websites, but big sites with a lot of traffic too, like WaPo. I keep meaning to start a list of examples, and then not doing it, but it’s stupid things like your/you’re and its/it’s, or just pieces of entire sentences missing.
I don’t think it’s the case that they were always there and I just never noticed them. Typos have always jumped out at me when I encountered them. And I don’t think I’ve been reading things more carefully than I used to. This makes me think that the actual incidence of typos is going up, but I don’t know how to prove it.
I’m starting this thread mainly to ask if anybody else is noticing the same thing. I wish I had started keeping a list, so I could link to examples, and this OP wouldn’t be so lame. But all I have is a vague impression that typos are multiplying, and I’d like to know if I’m the only one.
ETA: I guess it would be helpful to specify the time frame. I’m talking about the last year or so. Before that, I feel like I didn’t notice nearly as many mistakes.
These are things most spell-checkers do not catch. Yes: I notice lots of such typos recently, even at top newspaper sites.
I have a strange aphasia(?) where I’ll type a completely wrong sound-alike word, e.g. ‘values’ when ‘vowels’ was intended. I’ve occasionally noticed similar “typos” by other Dopers but don’t recall noticing any at other websites.
It’s been happening on French-language news sites here, too. I suspect it’s due to staff reductions and the typically once-a-day newspapers turning into publish-it-now Web sites.
I often read rawstory.com (looking past the hyperbolic clickbait headlines.) Despite being a news aggregate site mostly collecting articles from other sites, they manage to make mistakes in almost every single damned article, ranging from minor typos that are still understandable in context to more serious mangling to entire blocks of text missing.
I read rawstory myself, and awhile back I noticed that there were more misspellings and ‘extra’ words, usually at extra word at the beginning of a phrase (or paragraph).
I’ve wondered if some or all is related to usage of a talk-to-type kind of software. Sure seems that way to me from some of the more-obvious typos.
Yep. You can always tell which posts I make with my phone and which I make on a keyboard. Phone posts are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and I have at least two edits after they post to deal with some of them. Keyboard posts are typically much more correct. I assume that you have reporters with deadlines typing on tablets or phones and they get sloppy.
I think it’s partly that and partly the rush to be first to report stuff. Even big, mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post are feeling that pressure. In the old days of publishing a daily newspaper, stories went through many hands before being typeset. That’s a luxury when being first online might mean posting a story fifteen minutes before the other guy.
Maybe among news agencies there are more typos, but among the general population, typos and generally horrible spelling have gone out the window lately.
The tides seem to have turned. It used to be young people typping lyk dis all the time but I tend to see it among middle aged people more now. I wonder why. Maybe they think it is “hip” or maybe older people tend to have older smartphones without autocorrect.
The mistake I’ve noticed increasing in frequency is using ‘lead’ rather than ‘led’, for the past tense. That one wouldn’t be picked up as a spilling era either.
What has changed is that the kids who used to used to use text speak have grown into middle aged people who use text speak. In other words, nothing has changed at all, it’s the same people, they just got older.
Yes, typos on what seem to be legitimate websites that should know better have increased compared to the past. But it’s not just online - I saw a newspaper headline from a local paper a few years ago that was very obviously (to me) missing a letter, but it my mother didn’t notice it when I showed it to her until I told her what the mistake was. There are a lot of people out there who are unable to catch very minor errors, because their mind simply reads past them and understands exactly what is meant without an alarm bell going off. My main theory for why this happens is that they are unsure as to what is, in fact, correct. On the other hand, I tend to cringe whenever I see the third person neuter personal possessive pronoun with an apostrophe, especially when I see it in something my co-workers have written to a client. I have to even wonder if there will come a time when such a use becomes standard, because surely there’s a lot of people out there right now that either think it is, are unsure, or don’t care at all.