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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

#361

Post by quesera »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #333
vjerancrnjak wrote: post #314

On reddit it's even worse, I feel like Reddit is internally having their own bots for engagement bait. As someone who loves LaTeX, I can't imagine ever spending so much time on typography on online forums, italics, bold, emdashes, headers, sections. I quit reddit and will quit hn as well if situation worsens.

I have the sneaking suspicion that reddit has allowed and facilitated astroturfing for over a decade. As in, providing accounts, eliminating rate limits, artificially boosting posts and comments, and aggressively shadow banned contrary opinions. This is definitely a known phenomenon on a auto moderator level but I bet reddit ownership is complicit in it too

This behaviour is also openly acknowledged to have been used in early-Reddit growth hacking. So why not?

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

#362

Post by mike_hearn »

afavour wrote: post #241
yorwba wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be interested to know why those comments were flagged actually. They don't scream AI and no-one has replied calling them out as AI, etc. But the vast majority are dead.

The account was immediately shadowbanned after re-awakening from a long period of inactivity.

I agree it doesn't seem obviously AI. The early comments are all in the same writing style and smell human. Lots of strong opinions e.g.

"logged in after years away and had basically the same experience. the feed is just AI slop and engagement bait now, none of it from people I actually followed." [about Facebook]

HN has got a big problem with silently shadowbanning accounts for no obvious reason. Whether it's an attempt to fight bots gone wrong or something else isn't clear. By the very nature of shadowbanning there is no feedback loop that can correct mistake.

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

#363

Post by Vitamin_Sushi »

pyth0 wrote: post #202
homebrewer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how you get precious takes like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322362 > First impression: I need to dive into this hackernews reply mockup thing thoroughly without any fluff or self-promotion. My persona should be ..., energetic with health/tech insights but casual and relatable. > Looking at the constraints: short, punchy between 50-80 characters total—probably multiple one-sentence paragra…

I don't understand why someone would go through the effort to prompt that when the comments it suggested are total garbage, and it seems like would take similar effort to produce a low quality human written comment.

If I had to guess, it's probably an attempt to automate karma farming over time to make an account look legit later on.

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

#364

Post by [deleted] »

nerevarthelame wrote: post #204
rcarmo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still call voodoo on this. I use an iPhone, iPad, Mac to comment here—all of them autocorrect to em dashes at one point or another. Same goes for ellipsis.

You can remove em dashes from the analysis and the trend is still there: newly created accounts are still 6X more likely to use the remaining LLM indicators (arrows and bullets, p = 0.00027). Ellipses were never part of the analysis.

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by mghackerlady »

pvtmert wrote: post #352
marssaxman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing. This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some…

I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context. Not like I have a perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :) This applies not only work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.

unrelated but I've never understood how to put a smiley at the end of parenthetical sentences (which comes up surprisingly often for me since I use smileys a lot and also like using parentheses). Just the smiley as an end parentheses (like this :) feels off but adding another parentheses (like this :) ) makes it look like it should be nested which causes problems since I also tend to nest parenthetical sentences (like (this)).

Yes I enjoy lisp, how could you tell

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

#367

Post by pvtmert »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #157

Fwiw 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…

Having mixed feelings on word "actually" as it is/was one of my favorites. Other stuff like "for instance" and "interestingly" are seem to be getting there too...

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

#368

Post by [deleted] »

Lerc wrote: post #234
stronglikedan wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

great repo name!

It's worth remembering that you can argue that the use of the word is acceptable now, but can you guarantee that in 30 years time the future world will agree with you to the extent that they let you hold a position of responsibility after using the word 30 years ago. There is precedent here.

[deleted]

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

#369

Post by mghackerlady »

mike_hearn wrote: post #341
mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

Have the same problem but with bullet points, which I learned to type years ago and have used on HN for a long time: • Like • This (option-8 on a Mac US keyboard layout). Now it looks like something only an LLM would do.

Hell I've been accused simply for using markdown. Granted, excessive formatting in markdown (especially when I'm telling a bad faith wikipedia contributor to cut it out since wikipedia doesn't even use markdown) is one of the biggest suspects for me but theres a difference between italicising something for emphasis and and *bolding* every statement *to an excessive degree*

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

#370

Post by mghackerlady »

rnxrx wrote: post #325
mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

I'm also increasingly aware that my own writing style and punctuation seem to line up with what might be associated with an AI, but some of the tells (em-dashes, spaces after periods, etc) seem like artifacts of when in history we learned to write. I wonder how much crossover there would be between a trained text analysis model looking for Gen-X authors and another looking for LLM's.

People don't put spaces after periods? Do people really write.like.this?
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