7 ms·
The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ortusdux 6mo agoDid AI raise awareness of Em-dashes, causing more people to use them organically?
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo agoSurely yes, but also surely neglibly compared to the rise of slop being posted. Sometimes things are what they seem!
- tayo42 6mo agoI don't think my phone keyboard even has one to type
- BoredPositron 6mo agoLong press on - on both iOS and android (Gboard)
- sobradob 6mo agodid not know that
- bitwize 6mo agoY'all on Android should be using Unexpected Keyboard, where it's Compose - - -.
- throw0101a 6mo ago> Long press on - on both iOS and android (Gboard) Depending on the text area you are typing into, if you type two hyphens/minuses right after each other (no spaces), Apple systems often translate them to an em-dash (kind of mimicking (La)TeX). (If you don't want the em-dash, hit <cmd-z> with macOS to undo that auto-conversion.)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoTwo dashes seems to collapse into an em-dash using my iPhone keyboard.
- School-Cotton 6mo agoIn my case, yes. I have never used AI to write any prose (including HN comments), and I never will. But I certainly started using them more often since the ChatGPT era began, purely through osmosis. I'm not exactly proud of that, but there you have it.
- razingeden 6mo agoI use the double dash. This gets corrected to an emdash. I get annoyed and put the double dash back in. Sometimes swearing a little or grumbling “HEY. I typed what I typed” at it helps a little. I don’t even know how many times in 20-30+ years I’ve checked some box in system or program preferences begging it to knock that off. This is the real reason I already loathe and avoid the emdash (nitpicking over a personal stylistic preference I won’t relent on even if I’m wrong) but I can’t be the only one this happens to. Getting piled on and called “AI” really doesn’t ease my distaste for it, but .. do people.. not write enough to understand that it brute forces its way into human copy as well? and yes. phone posting on HN. will insert them. to my dismay. The other one that ticks me off endlessly but I’ve finally said to hell with it and just let it go? Turning " into “. (Writer. Not a very good one and I’m not here to steer anyone to that drivel. But at least I’m a human one.)
- Terr_ 6mo agoI do use fewer em-dashes now, but only because I spend more time on Linux, where my habitual Windows trick of alt + 0151 no longer works.
- Gormo 6mo agoPress Ctrl+Shift+U to enter Unicode entry mode in GTK controls, then enter the code point for the em dash, 2014. That will produce '—'. Although I still prefer the traditional ASCII double-dash -- easier to type, and less potential for character encoding issues. Also, LLMs don't seem to use it at all.
- operatingthetan 6mo agoI think it's both. People started writing AI comments and also started using em-dashes. However when my former boss would write emails with AI he would add intentional typos and remove all dashes.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 6mo agoI know I did. I don't want eloquent punctuation to fall exclusively to the clankers.
- Sarkie 6mo agoMy wife is a journalist and has always loved them. Now she's been accused of using AI for her pieces. Oh well.
- bb88 6mo agoem-dashes help flow ideas better than other means. For whatever reason, it's easier to process in my brain a comment with an em-dash rather than trying to split the idea into separate succinct sentences. You can do small succinct sentences, but style-wise it sucks for longer passages.
- throw0101a 6mo ago> Now she's been accused of using AI for her pieces. Read the observation that AI was (presumably) trained on the 'best' (or at least 'quality') writing, and so if good writers tended to use em-dashes, it should not be surprising that AI generates text with it. But, if one's personal style included using them, you should continue to do so because why should you dial down your own voice just because someone else may be mimicking it?
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoFor my part, editing Wikipedia raised my awareness of the different types of dashes, and when to use them appropriately. Unfortunately, my Chromebook is not so forthcoming in ease of input.
- interstice 6mo agoIf anything I use them _less_ now thanks to this whole thing.
- turtleyacht 6mo agoYes. Defanging smart quotes, double-dashing em's, spelling out numbers, and swearing off emojis. Next up, double-spaced sentences.
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoI guess you have to choose now whether to be accused of being a Clanker or a Boomer.
- lamasery 6mo agoHTML still collapses multiple spaces, doesn't it? Does HN go out of its way to add an nbsp glyph? Typing this post the original way I learned to type, with two spaces after the end of each sentence, to see if it renders that way. Here we go! (Incidentally, I love that backlash against LLM writing has more people developing as much of an allergy to emojis and content-marketing- and personal-branding-style writing as I've long had)
- Freedom2 6mo agoA reminder that according to the HN guidelines, there's no need to use underscores or other annotations to emphasize words.
- interstice 6mo agoI'm from the Myspace/MSN generation, old habits die hard.
- jordand 6mo agoUnconsciously and consciously yes, and this new awareness means others are now consciously avoiding the use of them so their writing is less likely to be perceived as AI generated junk
- Gormo 6mo agoAI raised awareness of em-dashes among people who didn't/don't read much, especially the kind of long-form writing that LLMs have been trained on. Treating em-dashes as a tell of LLM output is a form of unintentional "vice signalling".
- juped 6mo agoYou can pry my em dash—short for "Emily's dash", after the poet—from my cold dead hands.
- spudlyo 6mo agoClose, it's the width of the 'M' from the the famous author EMdash Forster's name. ;)
- kstrauser 6mo agoNot even close. It's named after the em drive, after how fast it helps your thoughts flow to written word.
- myhf 6mo agoI thought it was a reference to "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominu....
- lamasery 6mo agoHow is there this much misinformation out there about this? It's a neologism based on the character M from the James Bond franchise. Do a little free-association from the phrase "Bond—James Bond" and you end up calling that the M-dash. Until that relatively recent shift, it was named the Morse Dash—you'd think because of the "long" glyph when rendering Morse Code, but no, it was named for the 17th century English Catholic martyr Henry Morse, for reasons lost to time.
- adampunk 6mo agoWooooooOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooo— — A spooky ghost WooooooOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooo- - A less spooky ghost
- adampunk 6mo agopictured: cowards
- derbOac 6mo ago[dead]
- lapcat 6mo agoNow someone do "the rise of Hacker News meta-analysis blog posts".
- qup 6mo agoSerious request, I'd love to see this OP plotted against the rise of the em-dash elsewhere. Is HN more botted, or less? And are banned accounts excluded?
- meisel 6mo agoGotta love starting the y-axis above 0
- tmoertel 6mo agoWhile it is generally considered a No-No to start a bar chart from a baseline that is not zero, there is no corresponding prohibition, especially among numerically sophisticated audiences, for scatter plots or line charts. In general, we want graphs to focus on the area of variation. For example, take a look at just about any stock chart (try https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ?hl=en https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/GOOG:NASDAQ?hl=en). There's actual money on the line, but no baseline. Why do you think that is?
- BeetleB 6mo ago> In general, we want graphs to focus on the area of variation. Visually, this is vastly exaggerating the variation. Actual usage did not even double.
- tmoertel 6mo ago> Visually, this is vastly exaggerating the variation. Actual usage did not even double. No, it is literally showing the exact variation of interest. If you think it's exaggerating the variation, you are not reading the chart. You are glancing at the chart, ignoring what it actually says in multiple ways, and imagining it has a baseline of zero, when it clearly does not. Read the chart. What does it actually say?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- BeetleB 6mo ago> If you think it's exaggerating the variation, you are not reading the chart. That's true of every instance where a chart is criticized for playing around with the axes scale. Imagine the stock price of a company varied between 50.1 and 50.2 over a week. And I presented it as a chart with the min being 50.09 and max being 50.21, and drew all the variation over a large vertical space. And then tried to imply that the stock was volatile. What would be the problem? Let me ask you this. What is the point of this chart (or any similar chart)? Simply presenting a table with all the values would have conveyed all the information - wouldn't you agree?
- lz400 6mo agoI just learnt that em dash in a mac is option+shift+hyphen. I hadn't realized it was so difficult and inconvenient, and in the end it looks so similar to the other one: — -. Thin value. It's no surprise humans barely use them. Then why did it get picked up so much by AIs? I'd have imagined it's not in a lot of training data. Print media practices I guess?
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo agoIt’s neither difficult nor inconvenient, it’s just new to you.
- hyperhello 6mo agoWhy is that inconvenient? It’s a hyphen with modifier keys.
- BeetleB 6mo agoIt's used a lot in LaTeX and Word. It's not as rare as people make them out to be. It's just that we haven't had a convenient way to enter it in a browser form that some of us (younger folks!) find the em-dash weird.
- yojo 6mo agooption + hyphen gives you an en-dash (–), which is easier to type and I am guilty of way overusing/misusing.
- dragonwriter 6mo agoThe main use of an em-dash can also be done with an en-dash set open, and different style guides have different preferences for which should be used.
- dr_dshiv 6mo agoI love em dashes. They are so much less pretentious than colons or semicolons — and they help with flow of speech. I learned that key command a couple years ago and it made me feel so smart. I’ve had my comeuppance but I’m not stopping — just a better way to write
- Iuz 6mo agoI don't comment much but I have read everything that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, and because of him, have always used em-dashes on my writing. I think I even saw some memes in circles that discuss his work when people started realizing GPT used them a lot...
- bb88 6mo agoI like the em-dash as well as it provides visual space more than just a "-" or a ";" or a ", and".
- MikeTheGreat 6mo agogenuine question: How could you tell they were em-dashes? Like, I could see some people noticing that the book they're reading has dashes that are a bit longer than normal, but what made you think "That must be it's own thing, separate from a normal dash" as opposed to something like "In this font the dashes are very long"?
- Iuz 6mo agoHe uses it a lot, so it didn’t take long for me to notice that the dash was longer than usual. At that point, it felt less like a font quirk and more like a deliberate stylistic choice. I also recall that one of the translators mentioned his use of dashes.
- nagaiaida 6mo agowell, hyphenation will most likely insert a lot of regular dashes for easy comparison to rule out "this font is blessed with uncommonly long dashes" and the differing uses of both en and em dashes will cluster along grammatical lines (with em dashes separating clauses and en dashes relating concepts or bounds) which ought to eventually make it clear even to someone who initially bins those together separate from hyphens.
- pinusc 6mo agoIf you know the difference between em dash, en dash, and hyphen, you start seeing it everywhere—whether thet are used correctly or not. Books tend to have correct typesetting, so if you see a dash used as an em dash ought to be used, and if it looks kinda long, you can assume it's an em dash. AFAIK often manuscripts are submitted either with hyphens or --- in place of em dashes and then the editor or typesetter fixes it. Also, it's called em dash because it's as long as the letter m (as a rule of thumb), so it's usually an easy visual comparison. Finally, a typeface with hyphens as long as em dashes would be terrible and quite noticeably wrong!
- BeetleB 6mo agoClassic case of hacking the axis to exaggerate a point. It went from 19.3 to 32.5. It did not even double. Which means that if you see a comment with an em-dash, it's more likely to be human than LLM.
- northisup 6mo agome waiting for the "the rise of posts analyzing the rise of the em-dash on hacker news" posts
- jcims 6mo agoreal unlock - https://trends.google.com/explore?q=real%20unlock&date=all&geo=US https://trends.google.com/explore?q=real%20unlock&date=all&g... key insight - https://trends.google.com/explore?q=key%2520insight&date=all&geo=US https://trends.google.com/explore?q=key%2520insight&date=all... etc.
- crazygringo 6mo agoHow is it picking the comments? If it's all comments, including flagged/dead/downvoted/etc., then it's not reflective of the actual filtering HN does. But if it's weighting comments by their likelihood of being read -- e.g. mostly top comments on popular stories -- then I'd be a lot more curious. I'm not surprised AI spam has increased substantially. But I'd be surprised if it's affected the comments most people actually read to anywhere close to the degree shown in this graph.
- sobradob 6mo agoIts a random-ish sample. Question, do you often use -- in your writing?
- crazygringo 6mo agoAll the time. So funny, it's so automatic I genuinely didn't even realize I was using them in a comment about em dashes. My comment history has been full of them for over a decade by now... and I think you can tell which comments are from my phone vs my laptop by whether they're converted to — or not.
- andrewclunn 6mo ago[dead]
- Rekindle8090 6mo agoI'll stand firm on my believe that no one types an em or en dash. its always an llm. its a pain in the ass to type on most keyboards, impossible on some, and pointless on phones
- mcphage 6mo agoIt’s pretty easy on a Mac (or iPad with a keyboard)—Option+Shift+Hyphen. I do it without even thinking about how, it’s so second-nature.
- xxxxxxxx 6mo agoThis is interesting. I just fixed a Github issue where the code did not handle Em-Dash correctly. Ran some queries to check the stats there. No surprises: https://deepspaceplace.com/emdash https://deepspaceplace.com/emdash
- negura 6mo agostylometric analysis can be used to profile you. so if you were using em-dashes, this is good news. it helps you blend in better than before
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoRelated from last year: Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722
- flowerthoughts 6mo agoAnd here I am, just wishing that someone with the knowledge would make font ligatures that render -- and --- as en and em dashes, so I could use them more.
- iamnothere 6mo agoJust enable the compose key, then you can hold this key (typically right alt is used) and type the number of dashes required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
- flowerthoughts 6mo agoNice! Done. Thank you!
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoSome random comment turned me on to the fact that two dashes does indeed collapse to an em-dash using the iPhone keyboard.
- zvr 6mo agoOne of the minor but very welcome latest updates of Microsoft Windows was the addition of the capability to type Win+- to get an en-dash (–) and Shift+Win+- to get an em dash (—).
- number6 6mo agoshamless self plug: https://emdashmanifesto.org/ https://emdashmanifesto.org/
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoThank you (and I support you).
- kkfx 6mo agoWhile I use it in LaTeX I tend to avoid it in non-LaTeX contexts BUT even though it's much used by LLMs having switched to EurKey layout years ago I can type it on my keyboard as well as × and many others, so it's not such a perfect AI indicator.