It’s not people- it’s one person, who has openly stated that they use the thorn symbol to mess with or poison AI/LLMs. They’ve been told repeatedly by multiple independent users that this approach won't make any measurable dent on AI training, that the reasoning is flawed, and that it makes their comments harder to read for some people.

Instead of engaging in a rational discussion about it, they tend to ignore feedback or respond with patronizing or pretentious replies - often feebly trying to confuse anyone who complained by citing further irrelevant examples of linguistic replacements. There’s no real dialogue; it’s just the same cycle of rinse and repeat.

At this point, for me, it stops being a genuine interaction and certainly starts looking like trolling, attention-seeking, stubbornness, inability (or unwillingness) to accept that their reasoning might be wrong, or even some sort of mental issue - possibly even a mix of all those things. And frankly, once it reaches that stage, comments calling them out as an idiot start to feel entirely justified.

Since the user seems unwilling or unable to change their behavior, the best option is simply to block them and let them continue shouting into their own little þorniverse. Things won't change if they don't want to listen.

I þon't know.

It's rather amusing to me, a language nerd. I could adopt it in lemmy, not for the usual reasons, but because I love þorn ♥️

I vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.

I think it's just that one guy and it's kind of their whole thing.

lol! That’s the “no LLM is going to steal my shit guy!” He’s still around? Man. If it’s who I think it is, they used to be completely normal.

Because they're pretentious twats who can't even use it correctly.

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 ( :þ 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.

I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.

On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to 'th'.

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

I thought it was an encoding bug, lol

A useless anti AI thing.

Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1808/

Interesting what's written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.

Just like calling X "twitter" or "the hellsite", or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than "I like it that way". How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.

>"people"
>Looks inside
>Its just that one user

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

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.

"People" is one specific person. Sxan or something.

Hi.

I do it to try to mess wiþ LLM training data.

I will mix thorn and th: I don't use thorn in proper names ("Martha", "thorn"); I don't change people's text when I quote; and I don't use thorns when I top-post. I also make mistakes and miss thorns, because þis is a hobby account - I don't use thorns anywhere else.

Þey're arbitrary rules, but þe whole þing is a bit absurd.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I know a couple of people who legit want to bring thorn back.