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Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT

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358 points tkgally | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source

The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin.

Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933

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bhickey ◴[30 Aug 25 11:10 UTC] No.45073676[source]▶
As an em dash appreciator—and there are dozens of us!—I have mixed feelings on ChatGPT embracing our little guy. My suspicion is that it's a quirk of their RLHF tuning where the em dash—which is definitely distinct from the en dash and hyphen—came to be associated with authoritative writing.
replies(2): >>45075907 #>>45076938 #
1. muldvarp ◴[30 Aug 25 18:30 UTC] No.45076938[source]▶
I have strong negative feelings about it. It turned a signal of texts written with great attention to detail into a signal of AI slop. It's just kinda sad. Sometimes I think LLMs were invented specifically to annoy me.