So like, I’ve discovered recently that people actually say “lolz” and not spell out the acronym…and they’ve been doing it for years. I joked about this on twitter and immediately thought of a counter example as I’ve always worded BOFH (as in “bof” with a silent “h”) myself. Other acronyms are difficult to word eg HTH or RTFM. At the same time, I continue to be amused that acronym speak is still a thing.
Acronym speak was really common back in the earlier days of the internetz (pre webz – all the zzzz) and usenet. I have little doubt that was because the early net was largely IT type folk who loved using, and abusing, acronyms. You could craft entire sentences with acronyms. Then SMS happened, then twitter happened and there continues to be a need for character economy ie reducing everything to as few characters as possible, while remaining vaguely readable.
Even ASCII art has staged a minor comeback!
snail 
Lolz