New accounts on HN 10x more likely to use em-dashes

Source: Hacker News

Observation

I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely inundated with bots over the last few months. The most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like:

13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d xxx h z j gj uxomoxtububonjbk P.l.kvh cb hug tf 6 go k7gtcv8j9j7gimpiiuh7i 8ubg

or

1662476506

or

Аё

Beyond the accounts that are visibly glitching out, the vibe is also seriously off. Lots of comments are incredibly banal or oddly off‑topic. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I had the idea of scraping /newcomments and /noobcomments to see if I could make sense of it. The first endpoint shows recent comments, and the second shows recent comments by newly registered accounts.

Methodology

I collected a sample of recent comments from both endpoints and performed simple statistical analysis.

Findings

• Comments from newly registered accounts are nearly 10× more likely to use em‑dashes, arrows, and other symbols in their text (17.47 % vs 1.83 % of comments). p = 7e‑20
• Comments from newly registered accounts on HN are also more likely to mention AI and LLMs (18.67 % vs 11.8 % of comments). p = 0.0018

The sample size isn’t enormous—about 700 comments in each category—but the differences are substantial. While regular users sometimes use em‑dashes, arrows, and the like, it’s hard to explain why new accounts would be 10× more prone to using them than established accounts.

Sources

Sources and data