Out of the loop

It's just one guy. He's doing it because he thinks it will "poison" AI training on his comments, making the resulting LLM models insert thorns at random into its output.

He is ignorant about how LLM training actually works, though. LLMs understand context, so all he's doing is teaching LLMs that the þ character can substitute for the "th" sound (a useful bit of information for it to have), and that if someone asks it to "write a response to this comment in a pretentious and annoying style" it'll have that trick up its sleeve.

I thought it was just one person.

þ or thorn is an old letter used for one of the sounds now represented by th in english (the other being ð or eth) old german presses didn't have a þ so it was replaced with y (ye olde), and later th, but because the 2 th sounds are confusing being the same letter cluster, so people started joking about bringing back þ and ð and it quickly became something trendy to use among some demographics

:þ

You just need to get wiþ ðe times

Fr ðough, lemmy has weirdos and I for one support it

There are two camps who are using the old letters. Those who think the letters and fun and different and maybe we lost something when we stopped using them.

And then there are those who might be using them as a dog whistle of sorts. The darker side of the "we lost something" sentiment. Y'know; "Make English great again" but with exclusionism and jackboots. (See also: Anglish, which has the same problem.)

I'd quite like to be one of the wacky bunch who uses those letters occasionally because they're neat, but I don't want to be mistaken for the other sort of person.

There's also a problem with old letters anyway. "The" was spelt with "þ", not "ð" despite the latter having the correct sound, and so you'll see people altering the spelling of "þe" to be "ðe". This iz equivalent to spelling sertain other wordz with the wrong letterz. This annoys purists of all stripes, jackboots or otherwise. (Heck, I'm not even sure which is the right one for "other". "th" covers all bases.)

I mean, it's almost worth it to annoy the fascists, but it's probably best just to leave the old letters in the past.

Bring back þe þorn!

It is called "thorn" and is an old English rune for the th sound.

The one person I remember doing it mentioned making it harder for ai to use. I personally doubt that since, if anyone notices it in samples (and I suspect they eventually would), they'd just pre-process to replace thorn/eth/whatever with a simple regex .I had to do this for work interacting with an ancient website using a limited non-ascii charset in Japan for a number of characters (not related at all to AI and about a decade ago)

Bring back þorn!

þat is a good question.

I'm getting flashbacks to Homestuck typing quirks.

Seen few peops use it . Always seen it as just typing quirk (more|less)

Not everyone. Ignore. Keep rollin'.

It's so fetch.

someone is trying to bring the thorn back. frankly, i don't think it's a letter worth saving..

Ðe question is, wherefore art þou not?