Since they are set open, I assume they are actually using them as if they were en-dashes and not em-dashes, which the more common style would be to set closed, but I’m guessing, in either case, the reason is “because you can type it on a normal keyboard without any special modification, Compose-key solution, or other processing, and the author doesn't care much about typography”.
EDIT: Though these the days it could also be an attempt at highly-visible “AI didn't write this” virtue signaling, too.
Yes; because - is on the keyboard and — isn't. (Don't tell me how to type —, I know how, but despite that it is the reason, which is what the parent comment asks about.)
It's just that I have the feeling that people avoid using the actual em-dash in fear of being accused that the text is ai generated. (Which isnt a valid indicator anyway) Maybe its just my perception that i notice this more since LLMs became popular.
my original word processor corrected “—-“ to an em-dash, which i would get rid of because it didnt render correctly somewhere in translation between plaintext- markdown- html (sort of how it butchered “- -“ just now on HN.)
but what youd see in your browser was “square blocks”
so i just ran output through some strings/awk /sed (server side) to clean up certain characters, that i now know specifying “ utf-8 “ encoding fixes altogether.
TLDR: the “problem” was “lets use wordpress as a CMS and composer, but spit it out in the same format as its predecessor software and keep generating static content that uses the design we already have”
em-dashes needed to be double dashes due to a longstanding oversight.
The Original Sin was Newsmaker, which had a proprietary format that didnt work in anything else
and needed some perl magic to spit out plaintext.
I don’t work in that environment or even that industry anymore but took the hacky methodology my then-boss and I came up with together.
SO,
1) i still have a script that gets rid of them when publishing, even though its no longer necessary. and its been doing THAT longer than “LLMs” were mainstream.
and 2) now that people ask “did AI write this?” i still continue with a long standing habit of getting rid of them when manually composing something.
Funny story though after twenty years of just adding more and more post processing kludge. I finally screamed AAAAAAAAHAHHHH WHY DOES THIS PAGE STILL HAVE SQUARE BLOCKS ALL OVER IT at “Grok.”
All that kludge and post processing solved by adding utf-8 encoding in the <head>,
which an “Ai” helpfully pointed out in about 0.0006s.
That was about two weeks ago. Not sure when I’ll finally just let my phone or computer insert one for me. Probably never. But thats it. I don’t hate the em-dash. I hate square blocks!
Absolutely nothing against AI. I had a good LONG recovery period where I could not sit there and read 40-100 page paper or a manual anymore, and i wasnt much better at composing my own thoughts. so I have a respect for its utility and I fully made use of that for a solid two years.
And it just fixed something that id overlooked because, well, im infrastructure. im not a good web designer.
