Troll farms hastily adding to their init prompts "don't use emdash when writing comments"
New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
211–220 of 643 posts
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#212I don't understand what is the purpose of these bots? Nihilism? Vandalism? At first I doubted when people were saying that such and such comments was AI generated, I didn't understand the goal, the motives so I thought it couldn't be ; but lately I understood how dead wrong I was, we are submerged, I came to realize that we are eaten by a sea of these useless comments.
the motive is probably more depressing. a normal human who just wants human interaction. people interacting with something "you" wrote just feels nice and people like that stuff.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#213One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula: >this is [summary] >not just x, it's y >punchy ending, maybe question Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it…
The user [1] you've mentioned has 160 points being a poster of total four bland messages. This goes against a normal statistical distribution. And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale
I gather that you do not have showdead on. The account has a lot more posts than that, but most were flagged.
EDIT to correct: most are not [flagged], but [dead] anyway, so probably manual moderator action or an automated anti-bot measure.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#214I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
Just do it anyway—I always have, and always will. Well, I haven't always —just for maybe 20 years.
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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#215Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#216Biggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting. No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.
> No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.
...except ChatGPT fans.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#217Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ---------------------------- ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e…
You've built an interesting statistic from gathering data across the project. The real answer: ai models and agentic apps make building spam tools more simple than ever. All you actually need is just some trivial api automation code.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#218[deleted]
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#219I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
are there really places that a comma, super-comma; or (parenthesis) dont work roughly as well? I find the em-dash mildly abhorrent, even before this all.
it's a cadence thing for me
Em-dash matches how I speak and think-- frequently a halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop-- so I use them like that.
Em-dash matches how I speak and think (frequently a halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop) so I use them like that.
Em-dash matches how I speak and think, a halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop, so I use them like that.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#220One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula: >this is [summary] >not just x, it's y >punchy ending, maybe question Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it…
What motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this? Is it ideological? Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing? Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?
Scams (romance scams or convincing people to run some code on their machine), influence operations by an intelligence agency, or advertising a product.