3 ms·

Kind of tangential, but does anyone else worry that systems like these will start to dictate what is "correct" language. Basically pushing narratives subtly thr

• draw_down 9y ago
  Oh my god, come on.
• Jesus_Jones 9y ago
  It's an old worry. For years people have complained about microsoft word's hegemonic recommendations. I've read articles where 'real writers' had to turn off the recommendations, it was messing them up. Today we have less of a world wide leader (would google's algorithms be number one?), so there's less chance of one thing winning.
• ggg9990 9y ago
  Most people with any writing capability do not use these tools. They are for foreign speakers of English or extremely poorly educated native speakers, they only affect the bottom 50% of written content which is not what affects the development of language.
  • klibertp 9y ago
    Um, I just wrote a lengthy comment about how this is not exactly the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16322795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16322795 It's only mentioned in the comment, but the amount of mistakes in tech-related writing, by native English speakers and otherwise, is gargantuan and overwhelming, and I'd wish using something like Grammarly (if safe, open source and so on) was a requirement for putting your writing on the web. As it is, the quality of writing is so bad, that I (as a foreign speaker) don't improve my English in any way by reading it, and I have to be very careful not to repeat these mistakes in my own writing later.