My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.
Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember.<p>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.<p>And, no, we’re not from non English speaking countries (some of our parents are), we all grew up in the UK.<p>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”
>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it<p>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.
So interesting this is right next to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673809</a> on the HN homepage. Really demonstrates how polarizing AI is.
There's no contradiction really, this post is exasperation at being subjected to other people's AI output, your link is excitement at sharing AI output with the world. It's two sides of the same coin.
Are there any social media sites where AI is effectively banned? I know it's not an easy problem but I haven't seen a site even try yet. There's a ton of things you can do to make it harder for bots, ie analyze image metadata, users' keyboard and mouse actions, etc.
I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory.<p>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.<p>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).
I don’t want to pull the “we live in a society card” but you boys are having a Groundhog Day here every day.<p>If you don’t change the conditions of HN, or you don’t change your own condition, then these threads are a little more than coping mechanisms and spaces to vent. It’s not really a productive-productive use of time. You’ll just get trampled on with more AI content until the comments here are dominantly AI generated.<p>And people going after Reddit are strange. There are many active and cultured subreddits that have no bots. I’m also in favor of hiding post history as a deterrent to trolling brigades and preventing banning a person because they post in a subreddit I don’t like.<p>Anyway, back to your programmed 2 minutes of AI banter I guess.
Hiding post history doesn’t really work. You can just search for all the users activity.
The hiding of post history only serves to hide bot activity.
This is what you made an account to do? To dump on this community as you tell us not to dump on another community? Pot/kettle and all that.<p>You’ve got some ideas here I actually agree with, but your patronizing tone all but guarantees 99% of people won’t hear it.
In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account.<p>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.<p>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.
> The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know<p>Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it.<p>It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.
I can’t be the only one who has ever read <a href="https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html" rel="nofollow">https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html</a>
I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.<p>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?
One way to use em-dash and look human is to write it incorrectly with two hyphens: --
At this point I almost look forward to some idiot calling me AI because they don't like what I said. I should start keeping score.
I've been left wondering when is the world going to find out about Input Method Editor.<p>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.<p>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.
First time I’m hearing about a shortcut for this. I always use 2 hyphens. Is that not considered an em-dash ?
No it's not the same. Note there are medium and long as well.<p>That said I always use -- myself. I don't think about pressing some keyboard combo to emphasise a point.
You are absolutely right — most internet users don't know the specific keyboard combination to make an em dash and substitute it with two hyphens. On some websites it is automatically converted into an em dash. If you would like to know more about this important punctuation symbol and it's significance in identitifying ai writing, please let me know.
Thanks for delving into this key insight!
Wow thanks for the enlightenment. I dug into this a bit and found out:<p>Hyphen (-) — the one on your keyboard. For compound words like “well-known.”<p>En dash (–) — medium length, for ranges like 2020–2024. Mac: Option + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0150.<p>Em dash (—) — the long one, for breaks in thought. Mac: Option + Shift + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0151.<p>And now I also understand why having plenty of actual em-dashes (not double hyphens) is an “AI tell”.
And Em Dash is trivially easy on iOS — you simply hold press on the regular dash button - I’ve been using it for years and am not stopping because people might suddenly accuse me of being an AI.
Thanks for that. I had no idea either. I'm genuinely surprised Windows buries such a crucial thing like this. Or why they even bothered adding it in the first place when it's so complicated.
The Windows version is an escape hatch for keying in any arbitrary character code, hence why it's so convoluted. You need to know which code you're after.
To be fair, the alt-input is a generalized system for inputting Unicode characters outside the set keyboard layout. So it's not like they added this input specifically. Still, the em dash really should have an easier input method given how crucial a symbol it is.
Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.
This website absolutely is social media unless you’re putting on blinders or haven’t been around very long. There’s a small in crowd who sets the conversation (there’s an even smaller crowd of ycombinator founders with special privileges allowing them to see each other and connect). Thinking this website isn’t social media just admits you don’t know what the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd.
To extend what 'viccis' said above, the meaning of "social media" has changed and is now basically meaningless because it's been used by enough old media organisations who lack the ability to discern the difference between social media and a forum or a bulletin-board or chat site/app or even just a plain website that allows comments.<p>Social Media is become the internet and/or vice-versa.<p>Also, I think you're objectively wrong in this statement:<p><i>"the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd"</i><p>Which I don't think was the <i>actual function</i> of (original) social media either.
> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no-living human ever used before, at-least not that I know of<p>What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)
I knew it was real as soon as I read “I stared to see a pattern”, which is funny now I find weird little non spellcheck mistakes endearing since they stamp “oh this is an actual human” on the work
That's just what an AI <i>would</i> say :)<p>Nice article, though. Thanks.
The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This said, when the number of people that talk like that become too high, then the statistical likelihood they are all human drops considerably.
I'm a confessing user of em-dashes (or en-dashes in fonts that feature overly accentuated em-dashes). It's actually kind of hard to not use them, if you've ever worked with typography and know your dashes and hyphenations. —[sic!] Also, those dashes are conveniently accessible on a Mac keyboard. There may be some Win/PC bias in the em-dash giveaway theory.
I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy), while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version is not).
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Those are hyphens.
I liked em dashes before they were cool—and I always copy-pasted them from Google. Sucks that I can't really do that anymore lest I be confused for a robot; I guess semicolons will have to do.
I’m an em-dash lover but always (and still do) type the double hyphen because that’s what I was taught for APA style years ago
On a Mac keyboard, Option-Shift-hyphen gives an em-dash. It’s muscle memory now after decades. For the true connoisseurs, Option-hyphen does an en-dash, mostly used for number ranges (e.g. 2000–2022). On iOS, double-hyphens can auto-correct to em-dashes.<p>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.<p>This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.
And on X, an em-dash (—) is Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen. An en-dash (–) is Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period. I never even needed to look these up. They're literally the first things I tried given a basic knowledge of the Compose idiom (which you can pretty much guess from the name "Compose").
I've also used em-dashes since before chatgpt but not on HN -- because a double dash is easier to type. However in my <i>notes app</i> they're everywhere, because Mac autoconverts double dashes to em-dashes.
I'm always reminded how much simpler typography is on the Mac using the Option key when I'm on Windows and have to look up how to type [almost any special character].<p>Instead of modifier plus keypress, it's modifier, and a 4 digit combination that I'll never remember.
Back in the heyday of ICQ, before emoji when we used emoticons uphill in the snow both ways, all the cool kids used :Þ instead of :P
you can absolutely still use `--`, but you need to add spaces around them.
I’m a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will eat the internet, then they’ll paywall it.<p>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.
The irony is that <i>I</i> submitted one of my open source projects <i>because</i> it was vibe-coded and people accused me of <i>not vibe coding it</i>!
I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis</a>
This is the view I mostly subscribe to too. That coupled with more sites going somewhere closer to the something awful forum model whereby there is a relatively arbitrary upfront free that sort of helps with curating a community and added friction to stem bots.
It would be nice to regain those national index sites or yellow page sites full of categories, where one could find what they're looking for only (based) within the country.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. An invite only platform where invites need to be given and received in person. It'll be pseudonymous, which should hopefully help make moderation manageable. It'll be an almost cult-like community, where everyone is a believer in the "cause", and violations can mean exile.<p>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.
Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.<p>The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that.<p>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.<p>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.
It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast.
One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be?
We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.
I see a retreat to the boutique internet. I recently went back to a gaming-focused website, founded in the late 90s, after a decade. No bots there, as most people have a reputation of some kind
> Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.<p>Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a terrible move for several reasons.
given the timing, it has definitely been done to obscure bot activity, but the side effect of denying the usual suspects the opportunity to comb through ten years of your comments to find a wrongthink they can use to dismiss everything you've just said, regardless of how irrelevant it is, is unironically a good thing. I've seen many instances of their impotent rage about it since it's been implemented, and each time it brings a smile to my face.
The wrongthink issue was always secondary, and generally easy to avoid by not mixing certain topics with your account (don't comment on political threads with your furry porn gooner account, etc). At a certain point, the person calling out a mostly benign profile is the one who will look ridiculous, and if not, the sub is probably not worth participating in anyway.<p>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.
You can still see them in search. The bots don’t seem to bother hiding posts though.
> allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue<p>Isn't that just fraud?
Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn.
Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.
It is. Reddit is probably 99% fraud/bots at this point.
The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.
I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).<p>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.
why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to? that's what the "latest" and whatever the other one is for.<p>they have definitely made reddit far worse in lots of ways, but not this one.
> why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to?<p>"Latest" ignores score and only sorts by submission time, which means you see a lot of junk if you follow any large subreddits.<p>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.
The front page when I used reddit only contained posts from your subscribed subreddits, sorted by the upvote ranking algorithm.
Wouldn’t taking the API away hurt the bots?
I’m think you are overestimating humanity.<p>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.<p>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!
Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?
Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of it)
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What secret is hidden in the phrase “you are absolutely right”? Using Google's web browser translation yields the mixed Hindi and Korean sentence: “당신 말이 बिल्कुल 맞아요.”
I am curious when we will land dead github theory? I am looking at growing of self hosted projects and it seems many of them are simply AI slop now or slowly moving there.
Good post, Thank you.
May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social media adding the toxicity.
The Enshittification theory by Cory Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on Wikipedia).
Reddit has a small number of what I hesitatingly might call "practical" subreddits, where people can go to get tech support, medical advice, or similar fare. To what extent are the questions and requests being posted to these subreddits also the product of bot activity? For example, there are a number of medical subreddits, where verified (supposedly) professionals effectively volunteer a bit of their free time to answer people's questions, often just consoling the "worried well" or providing a second opinion that echos the first, but occasionally helping catch a possible medical emergency before it gets out of hand. Are these well-meaning people wasting their time answering bots?
These subs are dying out. Reddit has losts its gatekeepy culture a long time ago and now subs are getting burnt out by waves of low effort posters treating the site like its instagram. Going through new posts on any practical subreddit the response to 99% of them should be "please provide more information on what your issue is and what you have tried to resolve it".<p>I cant do reddit anymore, it does my head in. Lemmy has been far more pleasant as there is still good posting etiquette.
Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.
Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.
What is now certain is Dead StackOverflow Theory.
But what about the children improving their productivity 10x? What about their workflows?<p>Think of the children!!!
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