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It's nothing new, it's typewriter convention. When using a typewriter you are not supposed to care about formatting, you just care about the text and some basic structure. So you use straight quotes and apostrophes (because that's what typewriters have), you don't try to justify the right margin, and you don't care about the paragraphs looking "nice", just about their being clearly separated.
This style also applies wherever formatting is not available (plain text files), or not worth applying (like in internet forums). For anything where some formatting is expected, I find this typewriter style unacceptable, but the world is full of unacceptable stuff (I'm just reading a book with no indent and no space between paragraphs... and with translation and spelling mistakes).
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