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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

> slightly archaic

How are em-dashes "slightly" archaic in this context? Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically?

Academic papers doesn't count, literature doesn't count. I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online, or when writing informal texts, purely because there is no key for the em-dash on the keyboard (that I know of).

I posit that the use of an em-dash in online discourse is so archaic that it's a 100% surefire giveaway of AI.

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>Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically?

Thousands upon thousands.

>I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online

Meatbag humans whose education failed them don't. Other humans did and still do, from Usenet to Substack, and from Slashdot to Hacker News.

Here's a random PG essay sprinkled with 23 em-dashes:

https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

Here's a post from idlewords, 13 of them:

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

Here's the current top HN post, 13 of them:

https://aaronson.org/blog/square-theory

57 in this antipope post - many by Charlie, equally many in the comments:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-c...

And those are genuine em-dashes, the character.

Way more people, in posts, comments, etc. use en-dashes and hyphens as em-dashes (just because they don't know how to quickly insert proper ones, or aren't aware there's a typographic distinction, but do now the use of dashes for parenthetical statements and asides.

I use em dashes a bunch in both informal communication and more formal writing. Mobile keyboards have em dashes, and I also have the compose key turned on on Linux.

Recent examples on HN, all 100% human-written:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923622

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863882

For an example of more formal writing, this blog post of mine has 8 em-dashes across 6000 or so words: https://sunshowers.io/posts/monads-through-pbt/

I did ask Claude to review this post for clarity and flow, but not to generate any text.

I learned how to type em-dashes on Mac (option-shift-hyphen) 10+ years ago and have been using them with some frequency since then. Picking 2023, here are some comments with emdashes that I personally typed:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38796943
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916740
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36125055
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487782

I have a Mac (and am very familiar with all its nifty shortcuts) but also a Windows and Linux machine, how would one type it on those?

To enter an em dash on Windows, hold down Alt and type 0 1 5 1 on your keyboard’s numpad. (Alt 0 1 5 0 for an en dash.) This only works with numpad number keys so laptop users are out of luck.

It is insane that in 2025, this is an accepted way to type lesser-used characters on Windows still, when the Mac has had the Option key typing umlauts and em-dashes extremely simply (an umlauted U is literally option-u, u... Ironically, I'm currently on a Windows machine so I cannot even type it) literally since 1984.

My family is German (I'm firstborn American) so this was a huge sell for the Mac way back then

Sad to see that Windows is still stuck in the PS/2 days here

If you install Power Toys, you get a feature called "Quick Accent" which gives you a shortcut to get basically any symbol quickly. Hold down the key that's the most like the one you are looking for, and press space. A little menu pops up where you can cycle through all the variants.

So `- + space` brings up a menu with all the "dashy" characters. There's 12 of them!

There is also `Win + .` which brings up an emoji menu, where you can also access the symbols list.

The compose key works well on Linux. Typically mapped to right alt, compose-hyphen-hyphen-hyphen produces an em dash. (hyphen-hyphen-period produces an en dash.)

That's at least halfway between the difficulty of it on Mac and Windows.

Given the compose sequences are mnemonic, I’d prefer it over Mac every time. Compare Compose+<< and >> for «» to Opt+[ and Opt+Sh+[ on Mac. Which may or may not work depending on locale.

Not really. Maybe 20%.

Word and Outlook auto-replace double hyphens "--" with em-dashes "—", which is probably the most commonly used way on Windows.

Yeah, but that's not global. Mac has global keyboard entries for these things, and they are incredibly easy.

MS Office will insert em-dashes automatically in most documents, so in fact there are a lot of Word docs and Outlook emails that contain them.

I sometimes specifically try and trigger them: if you have a piece of text and go back to insert a hyphen, it won't em-dash until you've followed it with a space, another word and then another space. I now sort of end up doing '- x ' and then backspacing so that the word following the x now follows an em-dash.

They exist to provide clarity. The are not hyphens, or en-dashes, they're em-dashes. The fact that some people have forgotten how to use them (or perhaps not been taught), does not make them "archaic", it makes those people who find them as such to be ignorant of basic sentence structure and punctuation.

I think if you're under the age of 30 and you suddenly start using them, you're showing your GenAI a little too much, but the answer is not to get your AI to stop using them, but for us to teach people why they exist and to use them more often when and where they are appropriate.

I use and have used em-dashes my entire life, including online e.g. on Reddit, Slack, and here.

My wife and numerous friends our age do the same.

Among those who studied English at e.g. a college level it's a natural and not uncommon part of professional writing... even online.

At least for those of us old enough to still punctuate and capitalize our texts.

I’ve used em-dashes in all sorts of online forums for decades. It’s on the Mac keyboard, and there are also tons of tools that automatically convert double or triple dashes to a single long dash. They were never uncommon.

Surely this is an absurd exaggeration. I've been using em dashes everywhere (online comments, email, chat) for ~25 years now. I'm not unusual in this regard; everyone who cares about punctuation probably uses them liberally. They're not hard to type; on macOS you can hold down Alt and Shift while hitting the `-`, and on Android you can long press on the `-`. Maybe they're used less by Windows users?

Even just looking at my HN comments, 381 of my ~1200 HN comments so far (so >30%) have em dashes. This includes my very first comment on HN from 2009 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602094) and several that have multiple em dashes in them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16596894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17291032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17464621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18201613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18387981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843521

(and so on; all these are from 2019 or earlier, preceding GPT-3.)

I use them all the time -- indeed I just did. I love em-dashes.

That's not an em dash—or is it?

That’s a pair of hyphens.

I guess you got me as either an easily nerd-sniped plebe or an Old — I use it in all my discourse when I'd normally take a speaking pause.

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