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Notes -
Ace has been around for a while -- I think my first encounters were sometime in the tail end of the Obama era (cfe). Part of it seems like it was just joking-not-joking self-aggrandizement and partly because it allowed a lot of really convenient puns around cards, but 'demi' (for demisexual) and 'poly' (for polyamory/polysexual, bonus points where these mean drastically different things) started to be more common around that point.
My guess is that the 'why' is pretty boring, though: it just reflects a move away from IRC or other solely-text formats with rare physical meetups to an environment where voice, video, and physical meetups were increasingly common, along with remaining solely-text formats increasingly having an autocorrect (eg smart phone). A preference for short acronyms make sense when you're interacting from a desktop computer through mIRC; in the modern world, even LGBT(QAwhatever) is a mess to say and harder still to type without getting corrected to logorrhea.
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