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Comment by squigz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you're talking about here? What strikethrough? I immediately recognized it in your 2nd line as Loss. This is a culture thing, not an AI thing.

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Claude tried to explain the meme but without the horizontal bar, it was not 4-panel. It contradicted itself explaining the dots. It makes no sense:

• : (one person standing) • :| (two people, one standing, one lying down) • :| (two people standing) • ; (one person standing, one lying down)

So I had to look up the meme, saw that the entire representation relies on a strike through. That’s how you get one person in 1 panel. That’s how you get four panels at all.

Sure, if you have seen the meme without formatting, you would recognize it. You probably have seen bots reposting without the right formatting it just like I did.

Or you didn’t. Who can say for sure? That’s my entire point. Comment sections are dead

It's true that nobody can say for sure, but bots reposting the loss meme somehow strikes me less likely as some people reposting the loss meme. And an entirely ASCII-representation (ignoring the strikethrough) is extremely easy to post, so could make this a relatively common off-shoot of the meme that many would recognize, strikethrough or not.

Why do you think they were all bots?

I think you're being overdramatic. Googling "loss meme text" brings up a Tumblr post with this exact text - admittedly when you visit the page itself, you get the strikethrough, but if I wanted to share this meme and saw only the text in the Google results, I would share that confident that other people who know the meme would get it. I suspect other people would too.

Why are you getting hung up on Claude's response? How is this an issue with comment culture and not the LLM?

I didn't even remember whether it had a strikethrough or not but recognized it. It's nothing to do with bots, it's simple human pattern recognition. That rough sequence of characters is really only used in comments for that meme. Plus that it would've been placed in a certain context, making it even easier to recognize, which your comment didn't even have but it was still recognizable.

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