Discussion
The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments
lz400: I 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?
wwalexander: Apple’s text inputs usually autocorrect double hyphens to em dashes.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r: It’s neither difficult nor inconvenient, it’s just new to you.
jcims: real unlock - https://trends.google.com/explore?q=real%20unlock&date=all&g...key insight - https://trends.google.com/explore?q=key%2520insight&date=all...etc.
marssaxman: Difficult and inconvenient compared to what, I wonder? I've always really liked the Mac OS option-key system, which I found convenient and easy to understand; I sometimes wish I could type that way in linux instead of using compose keys.
northisup: me waiting for the "the rise of posts analyzing the rise of the em-dash on hacker news" posts
meisel: Gotta love starting the y-axis above 0
tmoertel: While 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). There's actual money on the line, but no baseline. Why do you think that is?
BeetleB: > 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.
ortusdux: Did AI raise awareness of Em-dashes, causing more people to use them organically?
jordand: Unconsciously 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
dr_dshiv: I 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
yojo: option + hyphen gives you an en-dash (–), which is easier to type and I am guilty of way overusing/misusing.
BeetleB: It'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.
umanwizard: In 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: I 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 “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 the emdash but I can’t be the only one this happens to and most people probably just accept it.
dragonwriter: The 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.
dragonwriter: > and in the end it looks so similar to the other one:Maybe if you are looking at it in a monospaced environment like the HN edit window; rendered in a proportional font, hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes are quite distinct from eachother.> It's no surprise humans barely use them. Then why did it get picked up so much by AIs?It got picked up by AIs because their training corpus includes plenty of professionally published work, not just informal, off-the-cuff communication, and professionally published work uses typographic dashes (em-dashes, en-dashes, and even 2-em- and 3-em-dashes) extensively. (3-em less so in newer works, it having, e.g., dropped out of the recommendations of the Chicago Manual of Style as of 2024.)
crazygringo: How 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: Its a random-ish sample. Question, do you often use -- in your writing?
crazygringo: All 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.
Sarkie: My wife is a journalist and has always loved them.Now she's been accused of using AI for her pieces.Oh well.
bb88: em-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.
Iuz: I 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...
MikeTheGreat: genuine 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"?
xxxxxxxx: This 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
Rekindle8090: I'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
Gormo: AI 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".
interstice: If anything I use them _less_ now thanks to this whole thing.
Freedom2: A reminder that according to the HN guidelines, there's no need to use underscores or other annotations to emphasize words.
turtleyacht: Yes. Defanging smart quotes, double-dashing em-dashes, spelling out numbers, swearing off emojis... Sometimes I want to double-space after sentences but haven't quite gotten there yet.
mananaysiempre: What is it that you like about it specifically? If you’re not picky about the choice of modifier key, you can configure the so-called “level 3 shift key” and have the em dash on the hyphen key at level four (both L3 shift and L2 aka normal shift pressed). For instance, on GNOME Wayland I have “Input Source” = “English (Western European AltGr dead keys)”, “Alternate Characters Key” (GNOME lingo for the L3 shift) = “Right Alt”, so the em dash is RAlt-Shift-hyphen.
marssaxman: The option-key layout system was easier to memorize than the compose-key patterns, which I struggle to recall. I couldn't tell you why, I just felt like I got the hang of it easily, while using the compose key system has always been slow and clunky.I've never heard of a "level 3 shift key"; I'll have to look that up.
