> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?
They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.
> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer
Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)
dude, hate to break it to you but the fact that it's your "one and only" makes it more convincing it's your social network. if you used facebook, instagram, and tiktok for socializing, but HN for information, you would have another leg to stand on.
yes, HN is "the land of misfit toys", but if you come here regularly and participate in discussions with other other people on a variety of topics and you care about the interactions, that's socializing. The only reason you think it's not is that you find actual social interaction awkward, so you assume that if you like this it must not be social.
It used to be Internet back when the name was still written in the capital first letter. The barrier to utilize the Internet was high enough that mostly only the genuinely curious and thoughtful people a) got past it and b) did have the persistence to find interesting stuff to read and write about on it.
I remember when TV and magazines were full of slop of the day at the time. Human-generated, empty, meaningless, "entertainment" slop. The internet was a thousand times more interesting. I thought why would anyone watch a crappy movie or show on TV or cable, created by mediocre people for mere commercial purposes, when you could connect to a lone soul on the other side of the globe and have intelligent conversations with this person, or people, or read pages/articles/news they had published and participate in this digital society. It was ethereal and wonderful, something unlike anything else before.
Then the masses got online. Gradually, the interesting stuff got washed in the cracks of commercial internet, still existing but mostly just being overshadowed by everything else. Commercial agenda, advertisements, entertainment, company PR campaigns disguised as articles: all the slop you could get without even touching AI. With subcultures moving from Usenet to web forums, or from writing web articles to posting on Facebook, the barrier got lowered until there was no barrier and all the good stuff got mixed with the demands and supplies of everything average. Earlier, there always were a handful of people in the digital avenues of communication who didn't belong but they could be managed; nowadays the digital avenues of communication are open for everyone and consequently you get every kind of people in, without any barriers.
And where there are masses there are huge incentives to profit from them. This is why internet is no longer an infrastructure for the information superhighway but for distributing entertainment and profiting from it. First, transferring data got automated and was dirt cheap, now creating content is being automated and becomes dirt cheap. The new slop oozes out of AI. The common denominator of internet is so low the smart people get lost in all the easily accessed action. Further, smart people themselves are now succumbing in it because to shield yourself from all the crap that is the commercial slop internet you basically have to revert to being a semi-offline hermit, and that goes against all the curiosity and stimuli deeply associated with smart people.
What could be the next differentiator? It used to be knowledge and skill: you had to be a smart person to know enough and learn enough to get access. But now all that gets automated so fast that it proves to be no barrier.
Attention span might be a good metric to filter people into a new service, realm, or society eventhough, admittedly, it is shortening for everyone but smart people would still win.
Earlier solutions such as Usenet and IRC haven't died but they're only used by the old-timers. It's a shame because then the gathering would miss all the smart people grown in the current social media culture: world changes and what worked in the 90's is no longer relevant except for people who were there in the 90's.
Reverting to in-real-life societies could work but doesn't scale world-wide and the world is global now. Maybe some kind of "nerdbook": an open, p2p, non-commercial, not centrally controlled, feedless facebook clone could implement a digital club of smart people.
The best part of setting up a service for smart people is that it does not need to prioritize scaling.
This particular lament is nothing new, and is also known as Eternal September, first described in 1994.
There are many compounding factors but I experienced the live internet and what we have today is dead.
So I go on my province's subreddit. Politicswise, if there was an election today the incumbent politician would increase their majority and may even be looking at true majority. Hugely popular.
If you find a political thread, there will be 500 comments all agreeing with each other that the incumbent is evil, 50 comments downvoted and censored because they dare have an opinion that agrees with the incumbent, 100 comments deleted by anonymous mods banning people for what reason? Enjoy your echo chamber.
Anyone who experiences being censored a few times will just stop posting. Then when the election happens they have no idea at all why people would ever vote that way because they have never seen anyone do anything but agree with their opinion.
What an utterly dead subreddit.
The Internet has never been dead. Or alive. Ever since it escaped its comfortable cage in the university / military / small-clique-of-corporations ecosystem and became a thing "anyone" can see and publish on, there has forever been a push-pull between "People wanting to use this to solve their problems" and "People wanting eyeballs on their content, no matter the reason." We're just in an interesting local minimum where the ability to auto-generate human-shaped content has momentarily overtaken the tools search engines (and people with their own brains) use to filter useful from useless, and nobody has yet come up with the PageRank-equivalent nuclear weapon to swing the equation back again.
I'm giving it time, and until it happens I'm using a smaller list of curated sites I mostly trust to get me answers or engage with people I know IRL (as well as Mastodon, which mostly escapes these effects by being bad at transiting novelty from server to server), because thanks to the domain name ownership model pedigree of site ownership still mostly matters.
Reminds me of those times in Germany when mainstream media and people with decades in academia used the term "Putin Versteher" (Person who gets Putin, Putin 'understander') ad nauseaum ... it was hilarious.
Unrelated to that, sometime last year, I searched "in" ChatGPT for occult stuff in the middle of a sleepless night and it returned a story about "The Discordians", some dudes who ganged up in a bowling hall in the 70's and took over media and politics, starting in the US and growing globally.
Musk's "Daddy N** Heil Hitler" greeting, JD's and A. Heart's public court hearings, the Kushners being heavily involved with the recruitment department of the Epsteins Islands and their "little Euphoria" clubs as well as Epstein's "Gugu Gaga Cupid" list of friends and friends of friends, it's all somewhat connected to "The Discordians", apparently.
It was a fun "hallucination" in between short bits on Voodoo, Lovecraft and stuff one rarely hears about at all.
Think of the children!!!