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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

marginalia.nu

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#24

Post by marginalia_nu »

cookiengineer wrote: post #7
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.

I wanted to point out that em dashes are autocompleted by the iOS keyboard. So the false positives and true negatives might have some overlaps without more details. I think a better indicator would be to only detect em dashes with preceding and following whitespace characters, and general unicode usage of that user. Additionally, lots of Chinese and Russian keyboard tools use the em dash as well, when they're switchi…

I think there is a baseline number of human users that for one reason or another uses em-dashes, but this doesn't explain why they 10x more prevalent in green accounts.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#25

Post by Aurornis »

cookiengineer wrote: post #7
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.

I wanted to point out that em dashes are autocompleted by the iOS keyboard. So the false positives and true negatives might have some overlaps without more details. I think a better indicator would be to only detect em dashes with preceding and following whitespace characters, and general unicode usage of that user. Additionally, lots of Chinese and Russian keyboard tools use the em dash as well, when they're switchi…

> I wanted to point out that em dashes are autocompleted by the iOS keyboard.

That’s why the analysis was performed over time. All of those em dash sources you mentioned were present before LLM written content became popular.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#26

Post by homebrewer »

onion2k wrote: post #5

I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.

If you are suspicious, look at comment history. It's usually fairly obvious because all comments made by LLM spambots look the same, have very similar structure and length. Skim ten of them and it becomes pretty clear if the account is genuine.

I'm more worried about how many people reply to slop and start arguing with it (usually receiving no replies — the slop machine goes to the next thread instead) when they should be flagging and reporting it; this has changed in the last few months.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#27

Post by squeefers »

loeg wrote: post #11
bediger4000 wrote: post #2

This is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.

Karma aside, flooding the comments with a chosen narrative via army of bots seems like it's already happening. I suppose the bots can also do voting rings, but they don't necessarily need to.

> Karma aside, flooding the comments with a chosen narrative via army of bots seems like it's already happening.

again with the conspiracy theories

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#29

Post by gritzko »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.

This is probably the time to add some invitation system like GMail had in the beginning. Or make a shade for accounts <1yr. Or something else, before things get too mixed.
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