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> I’ve been using them forever.

Many other HN contributors have, too. Here’s the pre-ChatGPT em dash leaderboard:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

This would be a pretty hilarious board for anyone who likes the em-dash and who has had many fairly active accounts (one at a time) on here due to periodically scrambling their passwords to avoid getting attached to high karma or to take occasional breaks from the site. Should there be such people.
Thank you for this! Apparently I'm #4 by total em-dash uses, #14 by average em dashes per comment, and #4 at max em dashes per comment, since apparently I posted a comment containing 18 em dashes once.
Can anyone make it go beyond 200? I feel like I deserve to be somewhere in there — at least I would be sad if I didn't make top 1000!
i suspect it’s a trait of programmers, we like control flow type things. i used to find myself nesting parenthesis…
Also we like text (maybe not as an inherent thing but as a selection bias) and we're more likely to have customized our keyboard setup than random people off the street.
its not an llm thing -- its just -- folks don't know how to use them (pun intended).

Same for ; "" vs '', ex, eg, fe, etc. and so many more.

I like em all, but I'm crazy.

> fe

Interesting, I have never encountered this initialism in the wild, to my recollection: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/f.e.#English

crazy vibes man