I thought so too, at first. But I kept seeing it in places---like user icons---where a typo wouldn't exist without a whole lot of ridicule, which I didn't find. But I wasn't entirely sure that it was purposeful until I saw someone write that Darth Vader is "teh evol" (the evil), and I thought Oh! It's like an accent thingy.

Only most people don't go the extra step of writing the whole thing phonetically ("teh preht-tey" or such), and so it comes off as one of those annoyingly cutesy things that crop up everywhere. ('Rents instead of parents, the fam instead of family, metro instead of city.) Those things drive me crazy! Like everyone's trying to create their own cute sub-languages or something. Yich!