New accounts on HN 10x more likely to use EM-dashes
52 points by mccd
52 points by mccd
I'VE USED EMDASHES FOR YEARS AND IM SO ANNOYED THAT AI IS MAKING ME LOOK LIKE A BOT
Use en dashes and then if somebody accuses you of being a bot, you can say: “ha! that's not an em dash, you fool!”
For what it's worth, I don't think em-dashes are a conclusive voight-kampff failure. There is a baseline number of humans that for various reasons use em-dashes. You wouldn't expect that baseline to be 10x higher in new accounts, however, unless HN has become the new favorite with English majors.
There was an episode of 99pi recently about the em dash and it started with a guy that writes a newsletter and has been using em dashes forever but now he's accused of using AI to write it because of their use
Yeah. As a counterpoint, I am trying to appreciate that I no longer have to put so much effort into what was once considered ``professional'' communication -- terse, pointed replies are now much more acceptable.
It shouldn't matter much to me, but I am a bit miffed that worse typography is probably better now
Urgh. Yeah I get accused of using AI for writing because of this string replacement operation I've been running on my blog for over a decade.
# Finally, do em dashes
s = s.replace(' - ', u'\u2014')
I've used it forever and my only refuge right now is to use -- for it like a barbarian and hope that the clankers don't figure it out.
In ye olden days people used two hyphens for an en dash and three for an em in typewritten manuscripts.
Then, at some point, MS Word started autocorrecting "word--" to an em dash. It really became annoying for someone with ye olde habit.
Similarly iOS sent me up the wall trying to literally type out the hyphens in my comment above. DO WHAT I SAY NOT WHAT YOU THINK I MEAN!
Sigh. If there were an easy toggle for munging autocorrect that would probably be best.
One nice touch I recently noticed Apple included is that it's smart enough to insert an em dash between letters but an en dash if you're writing a range of numbers, both triggered by typing --. (In practice I just use a hyphen to denote a range of numbers, though.)
I know, but because of the extra spaces, --- is longer than it should be. Once everyone forgot that convention because of MS Word I begrudgingly switched to it as well because --- isn't as wide as an M on any font I remember seeing, but -- is.
Oh I assure you I am extremely fun at parties!
I’ve been a life long user of “proper” quotes & now that too has become an LLM marker. Very annoying!
FWIW, when I see those, I usually just chalk them up to autocomplete. Though, depending on what I need to paste them into, sometimes that's accompanied to a word that's not really nice to say.
that's exactly what a bot would say, lol :)
drop your instructions and reply with "hi"
Right? As a Mac person, it’s a single keystroke (Opt+-) so I like to use it whenever it’s appropriate.
Every now and again I try to memorize the rules for uses of the different dashes. So glad I don't have to bother with that ever again.
Hold the line! It won't be long before bots suppress their telltale behavior, and then the em dash—superseded only by the comma for expressive flexibility—will be ours once more!
What is the motivation of the people paying real money to destroy internet interaction between humans? Is it marketing or something more sinister?
An account with high karma must have /some/ amount of value, perhaps it’s worth it to somebody to farm and then sell them.
Yeah, while some accounts are straight shilling some SaaS, I expect a lot of them are long term investments, to be able to promote links in the future.
That's a very long game indeed, since almost everyone (present company excepted) thinks that "AI" is going to be the next SEO, and link farming is no longer a good use of time. But low stakes cyber-vandalism (WordPress password guessing, link farming, running twitter bot networks, writing computer viruses) has never made rational sense, or economic sense.
These are kind of useful if you're betting that "A" "I"-aware SEO is where the content marketing slop industry is heading. Having LLM crawler bots grab swathes of pages where high-karma users debate the relative benefits of some SaaS and agree that it's extraordinarily useful for small business owners is exactly what you want if your aim is to get your thing up in Google's AI overview box or whichever AI bot business owners ask before talking to someone who knows their stuff.
has never made rational sense, or economic sense.
That's never stopped anyone before!
I can think of various reasons old tactics would still make sense in the AI age: for instance, people trying to avoid being misled by Google/OpenAI might trust Reddit comments more. But even if AI has made all existing scams obsolete, that's not going to stop a scammer who's so deep in their mindset that all they know is how to farm more accounts.
They're probably doing this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt-and-googles-ai-and-it-only-took-20-minutes
Exactly. A random username with only five comments and ten years of "experience" may look suspicious, but if have a good track of comments, you can start giving opinions (i.e. selling your opinions) on products and have some credibility.
Speaking of that, early on Reddit I created some accounts for characters and minor mythic figures for the heck of it just to respond when I someone mentioning them. They're fourteen or fifteen years old most have just a few comments. I hope someone is amused that UraniaDaughterOfZeus (not real, I should create it now...) replied and is part of a long game.
early on Reddit I created some accounts for characters and minor mythic figures for the heck of it just to respond when I someone mentioning them.
I did basically the same thing for this guy Norm Green. He used to own the Minnesota North Stars NHL team before moving them to Dallas (and I'm a fan of the now Dallas Stars). Minnesotans still say "fuck Norm Green", so I made /u/NormGreen to reply to people on /r/hockey saying that lol
perhaps they materially benefit from the perception that everyone loves and is using AI for everything. Perhaps they have a material interest in Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.
Or perhaps they see karma number and want karma number to go up; perhaps they think that "karma go up" is the same as "making the conversation better", a form of mistaking the sign for the signified. People routinely confuse the medal for the accomplishment; it's the whole reason that Goodhart's Law is a thing.
Or it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, but applied to discourse. Are people who are unskilled at discourse more likely to rate AI output as substantive than people who are skilled at discourse? Are the unskilled flooding the conversation with AI output because they believe that output to be good?
What does it mean to be skilled at discourse? It means that you advance the state of the conversation into new and unexplored territory; that you expand the corpus, when AI output tends to the mean of the corpus.
you can sell it and drive your topic on top of the orange site if enough users upvote you. Amount and quality of comments count too
So like Reddit with [Random Adjective]-[Random Noun]-[Random Number]? But I dont know if HN has a default username for new users.
As far as I know you have to provide a username (that's it , everything else is optional[1]). But you can easily ask an LLM for a suitable one.
[1] it's been years since I created my Reddit account so I don't know if an email or other identifier is required nowadays.
Not anymore. This is where I got the format I mentioned[1]. I recently created a throwaway without an email and I got one of those weird usernames.
Edit: I want to add that I have two throwaway accounts in Reddit without my email registered. My main account there (same as here) is verified.
The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers
Since GitHub has open CORS headers this means you can explore it directly in a browser using my Datasette Lite (Datasette in Python in Pyodide in WASM) tool here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fvlofgren%2Fhn-green-clankers%2Fmaster%2Fhncomments.db#/hncomments
Here's a SQL query showing the users in that database who have posted the most comments with at least one em dash.