Comment by riffraff
5 months ago
Fun, but perhaps the ratio of em-dash per comment would be more interesting?
Otherwise it looks like the "race" is biased towards just the amount of comment posted.
5 months ago
Fun, but perhaps the ratio of em-dash per comment would be more interesting?
Otherwise it looks like the "race" is biased towards just the amount of comment posted.
I actually just tried this out using a HN dataset from HuggingFace today. I did # of comments with emdash / total comments. It shot up in 2018 for some reason and then, at the very end of the dataset, seemed to start spiking late 2024. Sadly it didn't have 2025 data, but it was enough to convince me that maybe the emdash lovers who complain haven't been lying about using it pre-genAI.
> It shot up in 2018 for some reason
Probably some autocomplete related software release.
iOS 11, released in September 2017, added the Smart Punctuation feature, which included turning a double hyphen into an em dash:
https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/ios_messages_smart_punctu...
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