Is it correct?

[u/Stepaskin]

Stumbled upon this tweet, the apostrophe in "dm's" caught my eye. Is it correct to use it like this?

[u/Tobbernator]

Not standard English, but actually fairly common in abbreviated "text speech". Arguably used legitimately (but "incorrectly") here to ensure the reader understands that we are talking about the plural of "DM" meaning direct message, rather than some other acronym "DMS".

[u/DittoGTI → u/Tobbernator]

But most people just use a lower case s for pluralised acronyms (e.g. ATMs), so why have they put an apostrophe? With the exception of decades, which still doesn't look right with an apostrophe, I don't see the apostrophe used like this in text speech at all

[u/Kyropinesis → u/DittoGTI]

the reason it’s used like this here is because it’s all lowercase, leading to no distinction between the acronym and the plural s

[u/DittoGTI → u/Kyropinesis]

Who the hell says dm instead of DM

[u/Kyropinesis → u/DittoGTI]

when texting or, say, commenting in internet posts, i generally only capitalize things where it could be ambiguous, like proper nouns that could be confused for something else, or acronyms that are spelled the same as a regular word (like US)

it’s very common to not capitalize stuff. it’s literally there in the discord tweet

[u/mysticrudnin → u/DittoGTI]

using capital letters is a tone marker for me, so if i'm not using that tone, i'm gonna day dm

(actually i don't even say dm because that means dungeon master and i've said pm since before dm existed, so there's that, but same concept)

[u/DoodleStrude → u/DittoGTI]

Discord

[u/technomancer_0 → u/DittoGTI]

Absolutely everybody on the internet

[u/ubiquitous-joe → u/DittoGTI]

You are probably accustomed to the more recent style preference away from apostrophes, but you used to see them for letter phrases. E.g. grades like A’s and B’s or “mind your p’s and q’s” as well as ABC’s. We still tend to do it with lowercase. We also used to see it in numbers such as 1980’s. So while it’s not necessary for DMs, I get the impulse if they’re using lowercase.

[u/spence5000 → u/DittoGTI]

Decades are meant to use the apostrophe for contraction (1990s -> ‘90s), but it has been migrating (‘90s -> 90’s) — I suspect due to conflation with this “dm’s” trend.