I still call voodoo on this. I use an iPhone, iPad, Mac to comment here—all of them autocorrect to em dashes at one point or another. Same goes for ellipsis.
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Why would recently created accounts be 10x more likely to be created by owners of Apple products or English majors than the baseline?
I doubt it explains any reasonable fraction of this, but github moving from early adopter techies to general population "normies" would be a reason for the shift. I would expect it explains at least some increase in the use of em-dashes.
Do general population normies really use em-dash, or do they just reach for the dash they see clearly printed on their keyboard?
I think they're pressing the default dash (actually a hyphen) twice, and that autocompletes to a single em dash.
You can remove em dashes from the analysis and the trend is still there: newly created accounts are still 6X more likely to use the remaining LLM indicators (arrows and bullets, p = 0.00027).
Ellipses were never part of the analysis.
Firefox Mac - did this get autocorrected to an em dash ... ?
Looks like no. It's probably Safari that "knows better".