Comment by queenmab

I didn't say em-dashes were never seen before 2020. Re-read the sentence. It's a list - "em-dashes" and "things that you simply never saw before 2020" are two items in that list. But even assuming I meant em-dashes, it's interesting to compare how frequent they were a few years ago versus now. Take the most upvoted HN submission (8 years ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16582136

There is on instance, an obvious copy-paste. Now go to any from the current top list. I count 10+ per submission, even on submissions with much lower post counts that the Stephen Hawking one.

But I'm not going around policing em-dashes or smart quotes and calling people out for using them. It's more like when someone gets a bingo in ChatGPT phrasing and style idiosyncrasies then it becomes suspicious and I'd hate to think I'm here talking to bots (I've already left many subreddits because for AI slop).

I've seen highly rated posts on HN that might as well have started with "You're absolutely right!"