I mean, sure, these characters could be used to help estimate the likelihood text was generated (because human writers might be less likely to add proper non-breaking spaces), but I doubt these are watermarks.
Still hope HN adds a filter to block any comment with those characters in it :)
It is a very basic watermark technique (text steganography) if it indeed is supposed to be one.
A more advanced one would be a linguistic (grammar-based) one, but I am not going to give any more ideas. :D
It's not watermarks, it's just scraped typography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space
Different display apps may "display them identically" but others and typesetters/printing apps might not.
$2.5
billion
and $2.5 billionA shocking title which brought this to the HN frontpage, but then it does not hold. The characters all look legit in the position they are used.
Google do it with Gemini tho:
Magma7404•9mo ago
ungreased0675•9mo ago
relaxing•9mo ago
Magma7404•9mo ago
And why the fuck was I downvoted to hell for asking a simple question and giving my opinion about the whole thing? Am I on reddit or what?