The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments

ortusdux

Did AI raise awareness of Em-dashes, causing more people to use them organically?

juped

You can pry my em dash—short for "Emily's dash", after the poet—from my cold dead hands.

adampunk

WooooooOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooo— — A spooky ghost WooooooOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooo- - A less spooky ghost

lapcat

Now someone do "the rise of Hacker News meta-analysis blog posts".

meisel

Gotta love starting the y-axis above 0

lz400

I just learnt that em dash in a mac is option+shift+hyphen. I hadn't realized it was so difficult and inconvenient, and in the end it looks so similar to the other one: — -. Thin value. It's no surprise humans barely use them. Then why did it get picked up so much by AIs? I'd have imagined it's not in a lot of training data. Print media practices I guess?

Iuz

I don't comment much but I have read everything that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, and because of him, have always used em-dashes on my writing. I think I even saw some memes in circles that discuss his work when people started realizing GPT used them a lot...

BeetleB

Classic case of hacking the axis to exaggerate a point. It went from 19.3 to 32.5. It did not even double. Which means that if you see a comment with an em-dash, it's more likely to be human than LLM.

northisup

me waiting for the "the rise of posts analyzing the rise of the em-dash on hacker news" posts

jcims

real unlock - https://trends.google.com/explore?q=real%20unlock&date=all&g... key insight - https://trends.google.com/explore?q=key%2520insight&date=all... etc.

crazygringo

How is it picking the comments? If it's all comments, including flagged/dead/downvoted/etc., then it's not reflective of the actual filtering HN does. But if it's weighting comments by their likelihood of being read -- e.g. mostly top comments on popular stories -- then I'd be a lot more curious. I'm not surprised AI spam has increased substantially. But I'd be surprised if it's affected the comments most people actually read to anywhere close to the degree shown in this graph.

Rekindle8090

I'll stand firm on my believe that no one types an em or en dash. its always an llm. its a pain in the ass to type on most keyboards, impossible on some, and pointless on phones

xxxxxxxx

This is interesting. I just fixed a Github issue where the code did not handle Em-Dash correctly. Ran some queries to check the stats there. No surprises: https://deepspaceplace.com/emdash

negura

stylometric analysis can be used to profile you. so if you were using em-dashes, this is good news. it helps you blend in better than before

ChrisArchitect

Related from last year: Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

flowerthoughts

And here I am, just wishing that someone with the knowledge would make font ligatures that render -- and --- as en and em dashes, so I could use them more.