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The world now believes that em-dashes are a sign of AI, I guess because it's seen as slightly archaic due to over use of the comma.
by weego 1y ago
The world now believes that em-dashes are a sign of AI, I guess because it's seen as slightly archaic due to over use of the comma.
- bredren 1y agoGiven frequency of their usage, its a fair assumption. Emphasis using bold is also an easy tell.
- turnsout 1y agoAs a frequent user of em-dashes, it's quite frustrating, as I'm now self conscious about using them.
- ziml77 1y agoAwww no! Keep using them proudly! Don't let AI ruin the awesomeness that is the em-dash :)
- beAbU 1y ago> slightly archaic How are em-dashes "slightly" archaic in this context? Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically? Academic papers doesn't count, literature doesn't count. I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online, or when writing informal texts, purely because there is no key for the em-dash on the keyboard (that I know of). I posit that the use of an em-dash in online discourse is so archaic that it's a 100% surefire giveaway of AI.
- Jeff_Brown 1y agoI use them all the time -- indeed I just did. I love em-dashes.
- handfuloflight 1y agoThat's not an em dash—or is it?
- jaoane 1y agoThat’s a pair of hyphens.
- adrianpike 1y agoI guess you got me as either an easily nerd-sniped plebe or an Old — I use it in all my discourse when I'd normally take a speaking pause.
- sunshowers 1y agoI use em dashes a bunch in both informal communication and more formal writing. Mobile keyboards have em dashes, and I also have the compose key turned on on Linux. Recent examples on HN, all 100% human-written: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863882 For an example of more formal writing, this blog post of mine has 8 em-dashes across 6000 or so words: https://sunshowers.io/posts/monads-through-pbt/ https://sunshowers.io/posts/monads-through-pbt/ I did ask Claude to review this post for clarity and flow, but not to generate any text.
- waterhouse 1y agoI learned how to type em-dashes on Mac (option-shift-hyphen) 10+ years ago and have been using them with some frequency since then. Picking 2023, here are some comments with emdashes that I personally typed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38796943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36125055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487782
- pmarreck 1y agoI have a Mac (and am very familiar with all its nifty shortcuts) but also a Windows and Linux machine, how would one type it on those?
- dialup_sounds 1y agoWord and Outlook auto-replace double hyphens "--" with em-dashes "—", which is probably the most commonly used way on Windows.
- pmarreck 1y agoYeah, but that's not global. Mac has global keyboard entries for these things, and they are incredibly easy.
- sunshowers 1y agoThe compose key works well on Linux. Typically mapped to right alt, compose-hyphen-hyphen-hyphen produces an em dash. (hyphen-hyphen-period produces an en dash.)
- pmarreck 1y agoThat's at least halfway between the difficulty of it on Mac and Windows.
- sunshowers 1y agoNot really. Maybe 20%.
- aaroninsf 1y agoI use and have used em-dashes my entire life, including online e.g. on Reddit, Slack, and here. My wife and numerous friends our age do the same. Among those who studied English at e.g. a college level it's a natural and not uncommon part of professional writing... even online. At least for those of us old enough to still punctuate and capitalize our texts.
- svat 1y agoSurely this is an absurd exaggeration. I've been using em dashes everywhere (online comments, email, chat) for ~25 years now. I'm not unusual in this regard; everyone who cares about punctuation probably uses them liberally. They're not hard to type; on macOS you can hold down Alt and Shift while hitting the `-`, and on Android you can long press on the `-`. Maybe they're used less by Windows users? Even just looking at my HN comments, 381 of my ~1200 HN comments so far (so >30%) have em dashes. This includes my very first comment on HN from 2009 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602094) and several that have multiple em dashes in them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16596894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16596894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17291032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17291032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18201613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18201613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18387981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18387981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843521 (and so on; all these are from 2019 or earlier, preceding GPT-3.)
- Oreb 1y agoI’ve used em-dashes in all sorts of online forums for decades. It’s on the Mac keyboard, and there are also tons of tools that automatically convert double or triple dashes to a single long dash. They were never uncommon.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoMS Office will insert em-dashes automatically in most documents, so in fact there are a lot of Word docs and Outlook emails that contain them. I sometimes specifically try and trigger them: if you have a piece of text and go back to insert a hyphen, it won't em-dash until you've followed it with a space, another word and then another space. I now sort of end up doing '- x ' and then backspacing so that the word following the x now follows an em-dash. They exist to provide clarity. The are not hyphens, or en-dashes, they're em-dashes. The fact that some people have forgotten how to use them (or perhaps not been taught), does not make them "archaic", it makes those people who find them as such to be ignorant of basic sentence structure and punctuation. I think if you're under the age of 30 and you suddenly start using them, you're showing your GenAI a little too much, but the answer is not to get your AI to stop using them, but for us to teach people why they exist and to use them more often when and where they are appropriate.
- coldtea 1y ago>Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically? Thousands upon thousands. >I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online Meatbag humans whose education failed them don't. Other humans did and still do, from Usenet to Substack, and from Slashdot to Hacker News. Here's a random PG essay sprinkled with 23 em-dashes: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html Here's a post from idlewords, 13 of them: https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.htm https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht... Here's the current top HN post, 13 of them: https://aaronson.org/blog/square-theory https://aaronson.org/blog/square-theory 57 in this antipope post - many by Charlie, equally many in the comments: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cloud-approaching-rapidl.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-c... And those are genuine em-dashes, the character. Way more people, in posts, comments, etc. use en-dashes and hyphens as em-dashes (just because they don't know how to quickly insert proper ones, or aren't aware there's a typographic distinction, but do now the use of dashes for parenthetical statements and asides.
- anjel 1y agoSame type of "modern" behavioral adaption asll the perceived risk/reward of accepting voice calls anymore from unrecognized tel numbers