Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.
Answer? Probably "of course not"
They're too busy demonetizing videos, aggressively copyright striking things, or promoting Shorts, presumably
I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.
Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.
Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL.
I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.
In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.
Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for something which is obvious.
And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.
Just thought I’d add that in there as it’s a bit extreme to see an em dash instantly jump to “must be written by AI”
You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.
Also, I was a curmudgeon with strong opinions about punctuation before ChatGPT—heck, even before the internet. And I can produce witnesses.
YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content.
LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort.
Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups.
Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.
The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?
> 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.)
In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.
I look forward to the various security mechanisms required of this new paradigm (in the way that someone looks forward to the tightening spiral into dystopia).
Nah. That's assuming most cars today, with literal, not figurative, humans are delivering goods and food. But they're not: most cars during traffic hours and by very very very far are just delivering groceries-less people from point A to point B. In the morning: delivering human (usually by said human) to work. Delivering human to school. Delivering human back to home. Delivering human back from school.
I actually prefer to work in the office, it's easier for me to have separate physical spaces to represent the separate roles in my life and thus conduct those roles. It's extra effort for me to apply role X where I would normally be applying role Y.
Having said that, some of the most productive developers I work with I barely see in the office. It works for them to not have to go through that whole ... ceremoniality ... required of coming into the office. They would quit on the spot if they were forced to come back into the office even only twice a week, and the company would be so much worse off without them. By not forcing them to come into the office, they come in on their own volition and therefore do not resent it and therefore do not (or are slower to) resent their company of employment.
I do and so do a number of others, and I like Oxford commas too.
I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much.
Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media.
And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind.
And some others, who were advised to have an HN presence, or who want to appear smarter, but are not great at words, are probably copy&pasting LLM output to HN comments, just like they'd cheat on their homework.
I've gotten a few replies that made me wonder whether it was an LLM.
Anyway, coincidentally, I currently have 31,205 HN karma, so I guess 31,337 Hacker News Points would be the perfect number at which to stop talking, before there's too many bots. I'll have to think of how to end on a high note.
(P.S., The more you upvote me, the sooner you get to stop hearing from me.)
In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online) interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2 I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of, done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways.
There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not so different from what LLMs does.
1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication.
2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because:
3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect.
Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…
One consequence, IMHO, is that we won't value long papers anymore. Instead, we will want very dense, high-bandwidth writing that the author stakes consequences (monetary, reputational, etc.) on its validity.
Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it.
It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.
Might as well be yourself.
I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?
It lets users type all sorts of ‡s, (*´ڡ`●)s, 2026/01/19s, by name, on Windows, Mac, Linux, through pc101, standard dvorak, your custom qmk config, anywhere without much prior knowledge. All it takes is to have a little proto-AI that can range from floppy sizes to at most few hundred MBs in size, rewriting your input somewhere between the physical keyboard and text input API.
If I wanted em–dashes, I can do just that instantly – I'm on Windows and I don't know what are the key combinations. Doesn't matter. I say "emdash" and here be an em-dash. There should be the equivalent to this thing for everybody.
That said I always use -- myself. I don't think about pressing some keyboard combo to emphasise a point.
Hyphen (-) — the one on your keyboard. For compound words like “well-known.”
En dash (–) — medium length, for ranges like 2020–2024. Mac: Option + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0150.
Em dash (—) — the long one, for breaks in thought. Mac: Option + Shift + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0151.
And now I also understand why having plenty of actual em-dashes (not double hyphens) is an “AI tell”.
Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 - Aug 2025 (266 comments)
... which I'm proud to say originated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883.
I'm safe. It must be one of you that are the LLM!
(Hey, I'm #21 on the leaderboard!).
What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
Nice article, though. Thanks.
They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were.
The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've had EM dashes 10 years back... Unless they are way ahead of the game in LLMs, it's a safe bet they are human.
These phrases came from somewhere, and when you look at large enough populations you're going to find people that just naturally align with how LLMs also talk.
This said, when the number of people that talk like that become too high, then the statistical likelihood they are all human drops considerably.
Here's my list of current Claude (I assume) tics:
I can usually tell when someone is leading like this and I resent them for trying to manipulate me. I start giving the opposite answer they’re looking for out of spite.
I’ve also had AI do this to me. At the end of it all, I asked why it didn’t just give me the answer up front. It was a bit of a conspiracy theory, and it said I’d believe it more if I was lead there to think I got there on my own with a bunch of context, rather than being told something fairly outlandish from the start. That fact that AI does this to better reinforce the belief in conspiracy theories is not good.
To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search.
It may be great right now but the users do not control their own destinies. It looks like there are tools users can use to export their data but if Discord goes the enshittification route they could preemptively block such tools, just as Reddit shut down their APIs.
Of course, if (big if) it does end up being large enough, the value of getting an invite will get to a point where a member can sell access.
Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just have ideas stolen as a matter of course.
Ignore the search engines, ignore all the large companies and you're left with the "Old Internet". It's inconvenient and it's hard work to find things, but that's how it was (and is).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo#Founding
The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.
What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.
Social Media is become the internet and/or vice-versa.
Also, I think you're objectively wrong in this statement:
"the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd"
Which I don't think was the actual function of (original) social media either.
I’ve definitely been reducing my day-to-day use of em-dashes the last year due to the negative AI association, but also because I decided I was overusing them even before that emerged.
This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.
Instead of modifier plus keypress, it's modifier, and a 4 digit combination that I'll never remember.
The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that.
The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which increases page views and ad revenue. If it was easy to find an answer then they would get less money.
At this point I think reddit themselves are creating the bots. The posts and questions are so repetitive. I've unsubscribed to a bunch of subs because of this.
Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a terrible move for several reasons.
But recently it seems everything is more overrun than usual with bot activity, and half of the accounts are hidden which isn't helping matters. Utterly useless, and other platforms don't seem any better in this regard.
Isn't that just fraud?
These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.
they have definitely made reddit far worse in lots of ways, but not this one.
"Latest" ignores score and only sorts by submission time, which means you see a lot of junk if you follow any large subreddits.
The default home-page algorithm used to sort by a composite of score, recency, and a modifier for subreddit size, so that posts from smaller subreddits don't get drowned out. It worked pretty well, and users could manage what showed up by following/unfollowing subreddits.
At the moment I am on a personal finance kick. Once in awhile I find myself in the bogleheads Reddit. If you don’t know bogleheads have a cult-like worship of the founder of vanguard, whose advice, shockingly, is to buy index funds and never sell.
Most of it is people arguing about VOO vs VTI vs VT. (lol) But people come in with their crazy scenarios, which are all varied too much to be a bot, although the answer could easily be given by one!
I cant do reddit anymore, it does my head in. Lemmy has been far more pleasant as there is still good posting etiquette.
Think of the children!!!