New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

Hacker News · Feb 25, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like13 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 8ubgor1662476506orАёBeyond the accounts that are visibly glitching out, the vibe is also seriously off. Lots of comments that are incredibly banal, or oddly off topic. Hard to really put a finger on how, but I had the idea of scraping /newcomments and /noobcomments to see if I could make sense of it. First is for comments that are recently made, and the second is for comments that are recently made by newly registred accounts.With some simple statistics, I quickly found that:Comments from newly registered accounts are nearly 10x more likely to use em-dashes, arrows, and other symbols in their text (17.47% vs 1.83% of comments). p = 7e-20Comments from newly registered accounts on HN are also more likely to mention AI and LLMs (18.67% vs 11.8% of comments). p=0.0018Sample size isn’t enormous, about 700 of each category, but these are pretty big differences. While regular humans sometimes use EM-dashes, arrows, and the like, it’s hard to explain why new accounts would be 10x more prone to using them than established accounts.Sources and data