this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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It might be specific to Lemmy, as I've only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can't possibly be easier than just writing "th"? And in many comments I see "th" and "þ" being used interchangeably.

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[–] HatchetHaro@pawb.social 55 points 4 days ago (35 children)

i mean, i get why people are annoyed by it, but personally i found that the thorn didn't really impede my ability to read that guy's posts. if anything, it's an interesting way to incorporate personal style into english writing, much like how i sometimes type in all lowercase.

ßesides, it's fun tø fuck around å little bît.

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[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 46 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Attention. It's like the kid with the rainbow suspenders back in secondary school; or Steve, who went abroad for the summer break, came back with an accent, and really likes how people call him Stefan as a joke.

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[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 54 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (10 children)

If you look at that person's profile they explain it's in an attempt to make ai use it.

Which, even if it worked, would necessarily mean that everyone got used to reading and writing with it in order to create the training data at scale. So then it wouldn't be weird or confusing for the ai to use it.

It doesn't make a ton of sense. I'm not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though. I just think their idea on how to contest ai is a bit confused.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 38 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

I'm not into antagonizing him for it but I am blunt about it. That user has been made aware that it makes their comments harder to read for users AND that it's not poisoning AI but they do it anyway.

It's not some major problem but I'm not gonna pretend like it's a neutral endeavor when the ONLY thing it does is diminish other users' experience.

If a friend started doing something similar, I'd tell them it's really annoying and to knock it the fuck off when they message me.

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[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 30 points 4 days ago

I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though.

Same here

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[–] GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 58 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Its just that one guy who does it, i think either out of pretentiousness or to hamper indexing.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 62 points 4 days ago (1 children)

He claims it's to "poison" AI training data.

Innumerable people have explained to him that this doesn't work, but he appears to be either immune to education in this matter or is just using this as an excuse to do it anyway for some other reason.

[–] hogmomma@lemmy.world 40 points 4 days ago (1 children)

"Immune to education." I love it.

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[–] sefra1@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

I thought it was an encoding bug, lol

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way

[–] Bo7a@piefed.ca 48 points 4 days ago (12 children)

This person has been informed that the character is worthless at its stated goal of being AI poison. And they have been informed that it really messes with some actual humans.

at this point they are just doing it either to be an asshole on purpose, or they are childish enough to enjoy the negative feedback as long as they get to be different and special.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, I blocked em because it was too annoying trying to parse their posts - and the comments weren't very contributory anyway

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[–] popcornpizza@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 4 days ago

Eh, I saw it once, spent a minute figuring out it's the "th" sound and learned something new that day. Every time I see them, I know how to read it.

It's not that big a deal.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 days ago

Gotta be real for one mo.

People here are being very... what to call it, Reddity? Twittery? Shitty?

Someone does it for multiple reasons. It's their "signature". Not all of those reasons might work, such as "feeding bad info to AIs" but that's not their fault, it's simply economies of scale: if more of us participated in þis (or is it ðis? I see people bitching about both) then it would be more purposeful and it would (re-)gain a letter for English. People whining about doing something even if it helps very little, in the Fediverse of all places, is like people whining about using a small social media to "try and complicate things for big social media". Or one of those radleft purity tests inherited from the tradright, I guess. Dunno which one is worse.

Me? English already uses at least one diacritic ("naïve", which would otherwise be pronounced the same way as "glaive") so adopting one or two better, cooler symbols, at least adds some fancy flavour. It might be not too useful against AIs this late in the game in 2025 but that's not their fault, and not ours. Ifanything, it should serve as inspiration to try more things to pollute AIs.

And if that's not the reason? I'll buy that too. It gets me to practice AltGr, for one. It looks cool when printed. It makes for a nifty smiley ( and yes, smileys are better than emojis). Whatever your cup of tea, have some. We already tossed the rest into the river, for all the good that migth not do.

[–] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 32 points 4 days ago (1 children)
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[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 36 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!

sxan enters chat

Lemmings: Kill them!

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[–] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org 25 points 4 days ago (22 children)

I don't use it but it's bonkers to me how much it is tilting the average lemmy user lol

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[–] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 days ago (16 children)

Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can't a fella be a lil quirky in peace?

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