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Posted by todsacerdoti 11 hours ago

New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes(www.marginalia.nu)
572 points | 483 commentspage 3
onion2k 9 hours ago|
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.

lm28469 9 hours ago||
> HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

hm, the whole internet really, youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, blog posts, food recipes, news articles, it's getting more and more obvious

sunaookami 9 hours ago|||
I find the bigger problem with online comments are that people repeat the same comments and "jokes" over and over and over again. Sure we had those with YouTube 15 years ago when people always spammed "first!" and "who is listening in <year>?" but now it's gotten worse and every single comment is now just some meme (especially on Reddit) or some kind of "gotcha"...
lm28469 8 hours ago||
> I find the bigger problem with online comments are that people repeat the same comments and "jokes" over and over and over again.

And bots reposting a trending post from like 12 years ago to farm internet points... with other bots reposting the top comments of the initial post

skeptic_ai 9 hours ago|||
All will be fixed with real id attestation /s
Lucasoato 9 hours ago|||
Not exactly, bot farms can still be made with poor people IDs through black market. I don't know what the solution is going to be, but at some point we might forced to accept the reality that on the internet humans and AI won't be distinguishable anymore and adjust our services independently on the client being a person or a machine.
e2le 6 hours ago|||
That is a probable outcome however it would at least cap or limit the ability of bot farms to produce industrial sludge content.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 9 hours ago|||
ID verification with video capture for every post on an attested device.

lets bring back Chrome's WEI while we're at it

/s

kdheiwns 8 hours ago|||
AI post "improvements" are the most annoying thing. I see more and more people doing it, especially when posting reviews/experiences with things, and they always get called out for it. They always justify it with "AI helped me organize what I wanted to say." Like man, you're having an AI write about an experience it didn't have and likely didn't even proofread it. Who knows what BS it added to the story. Even disorganized and misspelled stories are better than AI fantasy renditions that are 20 times longer than they need to be.
yoyohello13 9 hours ago|||
I just assume if any comment sounds like an ad it's a bot. All the comments like "I'm 10x faster with Claude Opus 4.6!" or "Have you tried Codex with ChatGPT 5.X? What a time to be alive!" can be lumped in the bot bin.
e2le 6 hours ago|||
> human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment

I want to hear people in their own voice, their own ideas, with their own words. I have no interest in reading AI generated comments with the same prose, vocabulary, and grammar.

I don't care if your writing is bad.

Additionally, I am sceptical that using AI to write comments on your behalf creates opportunities for self-improvement. I suspect this is all leading to a death of diversity in writing where comments increasingly have an aura of sameness.

munk-a 9 hours ago|||
I don't personally care about the distinction especially since AI usually 'improves' things by making it more verbose. Don't waste tokens to force me to read more useless words about your position - just state it plainly.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

homebrewer 9 hours ago|||
If you are suspicious, look at comment history. It's usually fairly obvious because all comments made by LLM spambots look the same, have very similar structure and length. Skim ten of them and it becomes pretty clear if the account is genuine.

I'm more worried about how many people reply to slop and start arguing with it (usually receiving no replies — the slop machine goes to the next thread instead) when they should be flagging and reporting it; this has changed in the last few months.

taeric 9 hours ago|||
This makes me think a tool that lets me know how much of the engagement I was seeing was from bots would be huge.
onion2k 8 hours ago|||
If you are suspicious, look at comment history.

I'm never suspicious though. One of the strange, and awesome, and incredibly rare things about HN is that I put basically zero stock in who wrote a comment. It's such a minimal part of the UI that it entirely passes me by most of the time. I love that about this site. I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that either; when someone shared a link about the top commenters recently there were quite a few comments about how people don't notice or how they don't recognize the people in the top ranks.

The consequence of this is that a bot could merrily post on here and I'd be absolutely fine not knowing or caring if it was a bot or not. I can judge the content of what the bot is posting and upvote/downvote accordingly. That, in my opinion, is exactly how the internet should work - judge the content of the post, not the character of the poster. If someone posts things I find insightful, interesting, or funny I'll upvote them. It has exactly zero value apart from maybe a little dopamine for a human, and actually zero for a robot, but it makes me feel nice about myself that I showed appreciation.

esafak 9 hours ago|||
I was thinking of how to create a UX around quantifying or qualifying AI use. If products revealed that users had used in-app AI to compose their responses, they might respond by doing it outside the app and pasting it in. If you then labeled pasted text as AI they might use tools to imitate typing. And after all that, you might face a user backlash from the users who rely on AI to write.
vardalab 2 hours ago||
My STT is cleaned up using llm and it often likes those dashes. I let it be because I could not care less.
doe88 8 hours ago||
I don't understand what is the purpose of these bots? Nihilism? Vandalism? At first I doubted when people were saying that such and such comments was AI generated, I didn't understand the goal, the motives so I thought it couldn't be ; but lately I understood how dead wrong I was, we are submerged, I came to realize that we are eaten by a sea of these useless comments.
AstroBen 8 hours ago||
You can control the major narrative on social media — about anything you want

What we think others around us think has a big effect on our own behavior

simianwords 7 hours ago|||
the motive is probably more depressing. a normal human who just wants human interaction. people interacting with something "you" wrote just feels nice and people like that stuff.
im3w1l 8 hours ago||
The goal is likely to be able to astroturf with aged accounts down the line.
npilk 5 hours ago||
@dang would there be any possibility of creating a view that hides posts and comments by accounts newer than, say, Jan 1 2026? Similar to how https://news.ycombinator.com/classic works (only showing votes from the oldest accounts)?

I know this is unfair to prospective new community members, but I'm unsure of other good methods to filter out AI bots at scale. Would certainly welcome other ideas.

brianstorms 5 hours ago||
I read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes!

I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.

There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.

Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?

afro88 6 hours ago||
Honestly, comments are just half the problem. At least half the articles I read from HN are vibe written. And I only spot it after reading a few paragraphs. It's leaving a bad taste, and it's sad because HN was guaranteed to have plenty of things worth reading and it's deteriorating
peterfirefly 2 hours ago||
I would use em-dashes all the time if they were easier to type.
comrade1234 9 hours ago||
You can turn off iOS automatically converting dashes to em-dashes. It also turns off smart-quotes which when used converts any sms you send from normal GSM-7 (7-bit) encoding to utf-8 which doubles the number of sms messages you're sending in the background (even though they're stitched together to look like a single message)

To turn off Smart Punctuation: Home > Settings > General > Keyboard > Smart Punctuation > Off.

atleastoptimal 4 hours ago||
It would be trivial to make a HN comment agent that avoids all the usual hallmarks of AI writing. Mere estimations of bot activity based on character frequency would likely underestimate their presence.
seewhat 5 hours ago|
I’ve occasionally found myself wanting a comments filter with an account-creation date cutoff.

A -3dB cutoff might be >= 01/01/2020, to pick a round figure.

Yet I never browse https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Perhaps a classic comment filter might work…

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