It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
Thank you for doing what you do! I'm sure it isn't easy keeping this place healthy and thriving, but me and so many others really appreciate the blood, sweat and probably a few literal tears it takes :)
Nice to hear someone else is looking at Arc now as well! Any chance we might see some issues on anarki resolved now? Perhaps https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/89 would be a good starting point :grin:
Jokes aside, its good to see YC cares about community, and looking forward to seeing your nick in the comments. Good luck
Hi, I'm just some young guy but i wanted to thank you for contributing to what makes this site great. It feels to me like this is one of the last bastions of the true news aggregator/comment media of old and i really appreciate everyone who dedicates time to maintaining it. Thanks <3
> One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
I would love it if you could get the current HN code base into a state that it could be open sourced
I understand the desire to keep certain aspects “secret sauce” to prevent abuse, but surely that could be addressed with some kind of plugin mechanism and then just don’t open source those plugins
Welcome Tom! I want to add to the chorus saying how excellent HN has been for so many years, in large part thanks to the excellent moderation. I dove into forums early on and they have always been one of the favorite and most treasured parts of the internet. It's not an exaggeration to say that HN is one of the best ever. The longevity is commendable, especially in an industry full of fads and flameouts.
Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.
> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do.
I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
I remember those days (and your username) very fondly. Great to see you still here.
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.
Welcome, Tom! Y'all are making HN a place that I still love to visit every day. I find it awesome how dang et al. not only manage to keep spammers and trolls in check but also actively improve discussions by merging threads and asking people to behave.
That's a great introduction and a great opening from Tom. HN gets a second public moderator is a good sign. You would have to be crazy to agree to this but I guess brave, too!
It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.
I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
Welcome, and thanks for striving to keep hn the bastion of intellectual curiosity that it's been in the ~9 years since I joined. I get tremendous value out of this website, and I'm very grateful for the effort you all are putting in to keep it stable.
Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.
I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this community which remains so special to an entire industry.
As somebody who's seen communities come and go over the last couple of decades, I cannot praise Hacker News highly enough. And we can thank the moderators for that. HN is like an oasis for me: polite, sane, and informative, and your values and principles really shine through, especially below the fold.
I'm not sure if I should say "welcome" or "congrats" so maybe a little of both!
Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently won't stop growing
Thanks Tom your work is appreciated and I'm sure will be appreciated going forward. There's a whole lot of us here who really value this place, and the many fine minds who share time with us in it, and you're a big part of that.
you (few?) do one of the biggest jobs on the internet. it's been a bit of a vice, but sufficiently rarefied that it doesn't lower anyone for indulging it. thank you.
it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole. I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably the most interesting question of all.
how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.
I have to say HN is one of the best moderated online forums/sites on the web. dang does a great job. Even when he disagrees with you and moderates he is open to communication, clarification and adult conversation. I really appreciate his work and have no doubt tomhow will do the same.
Congrats Tom. I wonder if a particular model could be used as a baseline for these values or if they are already doing that to check first level prior to a human in the loop? I myself have been using AI for this purpose and have found it getting pretty good. I know its not a replacement for thoughtful moderation however, a tailored model for HN would also promote the tradition of HN in terms of having it not just be about who is there and have it more trained on its best practices to promote consistency, possibly as an aid.
No images. No reposting. No (public) popularity contest stats. A general vibe against politics posting. There's just not much here to attract the worst kinds of behavior.
Welcome Tom! I have been visiting this site (almost) daily for 17.5 years now thanks to the wonderful technical community and diligent behind-the-scenes moderation.
Right on! Thanks and good luck and please keep the ethos / vibe going the way it improbably has for all these years. I've been active online since about 1998, and HN remains unique in my experience. Kudos as always to dang for the huge role he's played in that.
While tomhow is of course welcome, I want to express gratitude to dang for years of quite fair moderation. I've been around multiple communities and he's nothing like those power-tripping libera.chat or reddit moderators.
Hi, I'm excited. I'm really wondering if you'll do such an excellent job like dang is doing. This is a really special community, and now it's in your hands as well.
One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.
On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.
It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term.
That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.
I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.
Now that we have an Australian, suppose I'll have to change my tactic of waiting for dang to go to bed before being naughty, how annoying.
Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.
Welcome Tom, thank you and Dan for helping to run one of the best corners of the web for many of us.
Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal / previous account or it will ruin it? :)
No, it's just a device to mark the context switch and to avoid misunderstandings, since the previous comments were all posted without an implicit "mod" bit.
It's about as clear as mine is. Weak binding between user handle and real identity has always been part of internet forum culture—at least in the deep section of the pool that HN likes to swim in.
> He and Gackle have discussed diversifying their team, and adding a third moderator who is non-white, non-male, and, Bell joked, “non-balding.” Gackle clarified: “We've talked to each other about that. But we wouldn't make it a requirement.”
Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect you failed on this one @dang.
Welcome Tom, it is great that you came to Dang's aid because I was starting to worry how much longer one person could do this great job brilliantly alone.
Thanks for taking on this role tomhow! It's seriously appreciated and I'm also heaps happy that there's now someone in Oz that can moderate while dang gets some no doubt much-needed sleep! Champions! Thanks for making HN so bloody choice! Over of the best places on the 'net for damned sure!
Isn't HN self-moderating with upvote/downvote/flagging? I have an impression that the notion of moderator comes from old forums (e.g. phpBB) where they didn't have those features.
Votes are not moderation. Ignoring manipulation tactics, majority consensus does not mean that something is right, acceptable, or in line with site guidelines.
Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other username.
The best way to provide feedback is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. I've received a reply to literelly every email I've ever sent (all credit to Dang and Co for being extremely kind and consistent in supporting my inner troll rehabilitation effort).
There is no site mechanism to alert moderators about @mentions, and due to sheer volume of messages the site operators will typically never get to see your well-intentioned message.
This thread does have better odds of being read than most, though :) cheers
Good luck Tom. I do not envy the people that take on the work required to moderate this site while remaining unbiased and I am glad you are ready for the challenge. I am sure you will do a fantastic job.
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?
Tom, please fix the flag abuse problem. It's gotten to the point where I realize there's no point in commenting on many threads, given my opinions, some of which are very normal nationally.
When I've found myself being publicly tsk'ed by the people around me, I've taken a moment to try go figure out why they disapprove of what I'm saying. It's been a useful life exercise.
A political talking point can be nationally popular but still political, so, outside the scope of the site.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.
I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.
Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).
> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away.
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.
I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions (cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance, etc.).
You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened and how fair or unfair we were.
When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.
upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be tolerated in a civil society.
I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch
Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.
I think it's great to see more moderation from non-Americans.
My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.
Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone.
It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
Thank you for doing what you do! I'm sure it isn't easy keeping this place healthy and thriving, but me and so many others really appreciate the blood, sweat and probably a few literal tears it takes :)
One more welcome from another Tom o/
Nice to hear someone else is looking at Arc now as well! Any chance we might see some issues on anarki resolved now? Perhaps https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/89 would be a good starting point :grin:
Jokes aside, its good to see YC cares about community, and looking forward to seeing your nick in the comments. Good luck
Welcome, Tom!
Thanks for your moderation work so far, and welcome as an official moderator. Glad you'll be helping Dang keeping this an awesome community.
Hi, I'm just some young guy but i wanted to thank you for contributing to what makes this site great. It feels to me like this is one of the last bastions of the true news aggregator/comment media of old and i really appreciate everyone who dedicates time to maintaining it. Thanks <3
Welcome! And also I am so sorry
Tom, what a small world. Seems just like yesterday we were at Inspire 9 together!
Welcome tom, as a fellow moderator its not easy haha, I am sure its easier than Reddit.
Best wishes! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
Thanks in advance, Tom. Never a better time for more smart work in this area.
All hail our new, most favourite overlord from the British Commonwealth on days ending in "y"!
> One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
I would love it if you could get the current HN code base into a state that it could be open sourced
I understand the desire to keep certain aspects “secret sauce” to prevent abuse, but surely that could be addressed with some kind of plugin mechanism and then just don’t open source those plugins
Thank you for taking up the mantle!
Congrats Tom!
Welcome, Tomho W
Welcome Tom!
Welcome!
Please rewrite HN as an SPA using the most bleeding edge alpha JavaScript frameworks you can find.
Welcome! Good luck for a hard job.
Welcome Tom! I want to add to the chorus saying how excellent HN has been for so many years, in large part thanks to the excellent moderation. I dove into forums early on and they have always been one of the favorite and most treasured parts of the internet. It's not an exaggeration to say that HN is one of the best ever. The longevity is commendable, especially in an industry full of fads and flameouts.
Dang and Tom, please keep doing what you're doing.
Observation:
How lucky are we that our contributions here warrant two fine moderators?
I just read Tom's brief story on how he arrived here and what it means and felt... I don't really have a quick word for it.
I know I am better for having spent time here.
Oh, I got it! A tiny bit spoiled, but in the best of ways. Yeah, that is what I felt.
How lucky we are indeed. :)
Do you have showdead enabled to see how many good comments are being unfairly censored? Otherwise this is just survivorship bias talking.
> He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do.
I wonder if there are any other secret moderators.
We're all secret moderators except you.
There are many, I think? Dang has mentioned other moderators (plural) before, I believe.
If you reach 160'000 karma you can see the secret mods
If you flag, downvote, and/or vouch comments, you're basically already a moderator-lite yourself :)
Congratulations Tom!
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
I remember those days (and your username) very fondly. Great to see you still here.
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.
In the classic tradition of thinking that “dang” is pronounced “dang” and not “Dan G.” I propose that we read “tomhow” as “Tomh Ow”.
If you torture it a bit, you can make it "tomorrow" said with a weird accent. To mh ow
Towhom it may concern,
I prefer the dyslexic pronunciation of towhom.
Has Dan ever commented on whether the "dang" pronunciation was intentional? I too, was under the impression he just liked the twanginess of the word.
I have people call me Joenot - in reality, this username was chosen decades ago by my mother, pairing Joe (my name) and Not(tawa) - my tiny hometown.
Sometimes I wish I'd chosen better but like many names, once it's out there, it tends to stick.
> dang” is pronounced “dang” and not “Dan G.”
WAIT WHAT?!?
I think tom(a)how would work too.
"To mhow"
Pronounced exactly as "to meow"
Welcome, Tom! Y'all are making HN a place that I still love to visit every day. I find it awesome how dang et al. not only manage to keep spammers and trolls in check but also actively improve discussions by merging threads and asking people to behave.
Would it be possible to give him a new username for this role like “darn”?
Then we can continue confusing the beginnings of comments that appeal to authority as interjections.
Yes, and then the next two mods could be "heck" and "gosh"! Maybe "dadgummit" if the powers-that-be are feeling spicy. :-)
That's a great introduction and a great opening from Tom. HN gets a second public moderator is a good sign. You would have to be crazy to agree to this but I guess brave, too!
It's always a site that's had dinner party vibes even tho it's so big. Weird! But the focus on curiosity and healthy is important.
I'm sure the features of HN are already extremely well thought out and precisely balanced, but I guess this is as good a time as any to throw out a feature idea: you know how you can favorite stories and comments? I want to favorite users, too. Maybe privately. Because it's like a bookmark thing where I can come back and see what interesting ones are doing. Just makes sense to internalize it as a list rather than externalize it into a browser bookmark list, I think. But then again, maybe a private list or yet another list would be too much!
Welcome, and thanks for striving to keep hn the bastion of intellectual curiosity that it's been in the ~9 years since I joined. I get tremendous value out of this website, and I'm very grateful for the effort you all are putting in to keep it stable.
Welcome, Tom! Sometimes I can't believe how good we have it here. Thank you both very much.
Sincere thanks to you too, Scott.
Congrats Tom!
Thanks dang and other mods for protecting this sacred corner of the web for so long. You're the guardians of the best no-BS tech news community. It is truly an under-appreciated effort.
Best wishes.
I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this community which remains so special to an entire industry.
Welcome, Tom! Thanks for supporting this community for so long. Your work is much appreciated!
As somebody who's seen communities come and go over the last couple of decades, I cannot praise Hacker News highly enough. And we can thank the moderators for that. HN is like an oasis for me: polite, sane, and informative, and your values and principles really shine through, especially below the fold.
Thanks for keeping the standards so high here!
> He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on
I laughed at this phrasing. Welcome tomhow!
Great! Look forward to not noticing anything in particular changing around here. Seriously appreciate this site.
I always wondered how HN manages to do moderation 24/7 around the clock. Australia makes sense.
A lot of it boils down on dang being oversubscribed. And having some automations to help him
Welcome Tom! And thanks Dang for tirelessly looking after the community. HN is one of the last few sane places on the internet :)
May we please have another mod based within GMT to round out this follow-the-sun pattern that's slowly rising
I'm not sure if I should say "welcome" or "congrats" so maybe a little of both!
Moderation is a huge part of what makes HN so valuable, so it's good to hear dang is getting some much needed help as this place apparently won't stop growing
"Well, grats!"
Thanks Tom your work is appreciated and I'm sure will be appreciated going forward. There's a whole lot of us here who really value this place, and the many fine minds who share time with us in it, and you're a big part of that.
you (few?) do one of the biggest jobs on the internet. it's been a bit of a vice, but sufficiently rarefied that it doesn't lower anyone for indulging it. thank you.
it's said that perfect means lacking nothing essential to its whole. I've often speculated about the mechanics behind it, but really, it's a product that I think achieves today what apple and a lot of others aspire to be, where it does something well enough that almost nobody stops to question how. even if - or especially, when - that's probably the most interesting question of all.
how do you replicate it? you can't. that's the point.
may the odds ever be in your favour!
I have to say HN is one of the best moderated online forums/sites on the web. dang does a great job. Even when he disagrees with you and moderates he is open to communication, clarification and adult conversation. I really appreciate his work and have no doubt tomhow will do the same.
I will post this every year on moderator day as a sign of respect for this place. http://cosmonautdreams.com/images/dang.jpg
Congrats Tom. I wonder if a particular model could be used as a baseline for these values or if they are already doing that to check first level prior to a human in the loop? I myself have been using AI for this purpose and have found it getting pretty good. I know its not a replacement for thoughtful moderation however, a tailored model for HN would also promote the tradition of HN in terms of having it not just be about who is there and have it more trained on its best practices to promote consistency, possibly as an aid.
How does such a large famous forum get by with 1 computer and 2 mods. Theres no spam here. No fighting. How odd for the internet in 2025 XD
No images. No reposting. No (public) popularity contest stats. A general vibe against politics posting. There's just not much here to attract the worst kinds of behavior.
Welcome Tom! I have been visiting this site (almost) daily for 17.5 years now thanks to the wonderful technical community and diligent behind-the-scenes moderation.
Thanks for the work you guys do, Dan and Tom, to keep this place a good and intellectually stimulating place for discussion. We appreciate you.
Welcome aboard Tom. Thanks to the efforts of dang HN has become an incredible community. I've learned a lot on here and made some great friends.
I want to say Welcome but Tom has been on HN for so long.
I want to say Congrats but moderating HN must have been a painful job.
So I guess enjoy, have fun and see you around. :)
Congrats, Tom! I’m glad to hear there’s more than one moderator here so you can share the workload and hopefully relax well on your time off.
>I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)
I thought that sctb was another one? No longer I guess?
Alas, not for a few years. He is greatly missed.
Welcome Tom! Thanks for helping to make this the highest signal-to-noise ratio forum in the general technology/business space.
Congrats Tom! And thanks Dan! (Yes, I've been around long enough to know the "G" is for your last name! :)
I feel like it's a little unfair when it's coming from "eddyg".
Welcome Tom!
Thanks (in arrears and advance) for all the work here; this is the best forum on the Internet, and we owe much of it to you guys.
Congrats and welcome to the new public status! Forgive the non-substantive comment but that's awesome :-)
Right on! Thanks and good luck and please keep the ethos / vibe going the way it improbably has for all these years. I've been active online since about 1998, and HN remains unique in my experience. Kudos as always to dang for the huge role he's played in that.
Welcome Tom! Wishing you good luck from this former Reddit mod -- I know how hard the job can be!
Congratulations Tom. Great to see the antipodes represented on the HN team :)
This better not have any impacts on my capacity for mischief and shenanigans...
Anywho, welcome tomhow.
While tomhow is of course welcome, I want to express gratitude to dang for years of quite fair moderation. I've been around multiple communities and he's nothing like those power-tripping libera.chat or reddit moderators.
Congrats Tom. Fellow aussie HN lover here. Keep up the good work.
Welcome and courage tomhow.
Hi, I'm excited. I'm really wondering if you'll do such an excellent job like dang is doing. This is a really special community, and now it's in your hands as well.
One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.
On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.
It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
Good luck and thanks!
> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term.
That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.
I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly...
Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.
> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.
Welcome tom!
I'm long time lurker on hn. Excited to see you as mod.
Tom what was your company in YC W09? And how did it go?
This is what it became:
https://volantio.com
https://amadeus.com/en/airlines/products/volantio
https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa...
Now that we have an Australian, suppose I'll have to change my tactic of waiting for dang to go to bed before being naughty, how annoying.
Nice to see another helper. Dan, you are truly wonderful and I hope you never leave us, however, I also hope this affords you some much deserved "time off". Welcome Tom, and how.
Welcome welcome! It's crazy to think of how relatively long-lasting HN's influence on startups and tech has already been.
The question is, who among is willing to be the object of tomhow's first official Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty? ;)
Welcome
Welcome Tom, thank you and Dan for helping to run one of the best corners of the web for many of us.
Curious that you both made new accounts, is that basically a similar thing to having a "root" user then? So you can't use a normal / previous account or it will ruin it? :)
No, it's just a device to mark the context switch and to avoid misunderstandings, since the previous comments were all posted without an implicit "mod" bit.
Welcome, Tom. Are you a Neal Stephenson fan? There's a memorable character in Cryptonomicon who shares your name...
Welcome!! I was worried for a second that you were the Fallout Tom Howard, lol.
Unsung heroes deserve praise. Cheers mate.
Thinking far ahead, is there some way we can train LLMs that will moderate the same way as dang?
>Fenn Wait really? I've never met or heard of anybody else sharing my name! That's crazy!
Welcome! can we call you tang?
Congratulation Tom! :) Thank you for doing what you do here. Appreciate it.
Nice! Thanks for the good work.
Good luck tom in your new role!
Congrats mate, hope it’s a smooth transition into the limelight for you
Thanks for being a crucial part of this crucial part of my life, Tom.
I don't envy any referee who hopes to keep politics and technology in separate corners and playing by Queensberry Rules. But good luck all the same.
When the technologists enter politics it is even harder!
Are mods on HN paid or do they just do it for the love of the game?
Dang is paid: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
Great news and best of luck during this period of high tensions.
I thought it is an April fool joke about having Tom Holland as moderator.
My bad.
Welcome, Tom. Not easy shoes to fill! Moderation can be tricky.
I thought he was just a character from Cryptonomicon.
Welcome! Excited to be under your wing Tom! Thank you Dan!
Tom has now put Australia in the spotlights :P
WA here, hehe. Congrats!
Good Morning Oz! Congrats, you're on overnight duty
G'day! 24/7 SRE coverage. Yay! R stands for respectability.
What’s the purpose of having a less clear username?
It's about as clear as mine is. Weak binding between user handle and real identity has always been part of internet forum culture—at least in the deep section of the pool that HN likes to swim in.
A: Welcome!
And B: Just curious, what was dang's old longname?
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gruseom
I would guess some version of "Daniel Gackle", as seen at the very bottom of https://www.ycombinator.com/people.html
'gruseom
Moin Tom,
Thanks for putting up with the work - let's go!
Thank you for what has to be a tough job.
Warm welcome Tom! Hope it’s an easy gig.
Congrats Tom! Thank you for your service.
Congrats! Keep on making HN what it is!
Any comments on this post regarding moderation at hacker news:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...
Power means being able to ignore the naysayers.
What does that comic strip say, "Everything's fine."?
Most people desire nothing more than to ignore their own faults, unless they have the power to shut up their critics.
Welcome, Tom and thank you Dang.
Welcome! Just do your best.
> He and Gackle have discussed diversifying their team, and adding a third moderator who is non-white, non-male, and, Bell joked, “non-balding.” Gackle clarified: “We've talked to each other about that. But we wouldn't make it a requirement.”
Without any negativity on Tom, whom I'm sure is excellent, I suspect you failed on this one @dang.
Welcome Tom, it is great that you came to Dang's aid because I was starting to worry how much longer one person could do this great job brilliantly alone.
Oh hey. Congrats, tomhow!
Thanks for taking on this role tomhow! It's seriously appreciated and I'm also heaps happy that there's now someone in Oz that can moderate while dang gets some no doubt much-needed sleep! Champions! Thanks for making HN so bloody choice! Over of the best places on the 'net for damned sure!
Congrats and welcome!
Welcome Tom, all the best with your new role and thanks for being a moderator along with Daniel :-)
It’s good to see MGR (Moderator Geographic Redundancy) being implemented on HN ;-)
Using RAID as an analogy, we now have RAID 1 moderators so let’s hope to have RAID 6 soon :-P
Ok ok, enough with the silly tech jokes and the smiley’s.
Welcome tomho!
Congratulations!
Isn't HN self-moderating with upvote/downvote/flagging? I have an impression that the notion of moderator comes from old forums (e.g. phpBB) where they didn't have those features.
Votes are not moderation. Ignoring manipulation tactics, majority consensus does not mean that something is right, acceptable, or in line with site guidelines.
Congrats, Tom!
Congrats Tom!
Welcome Tom and thank you for helping out this wonderful community.
Just out of curiosity, are you and dang payed for caring for this forum? It seems to me it requires a lot of time and dedication.
It is an actual job, yes :)
Both are paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560796
It actually works like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40014518 and they just threw another person into the maple syrup/bacta tank
Congrats Tom!
Dang, and Tom: I think it would be useful for you two moderators to use a "special" color, instead of the light gray that is used for any other username.
I've always resisted that, and I suppose it's fair to say pg did too. It feels like an unnecessary barrier between us and others.
The best way to provide feedback is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. I've received a reply to literelly every email I've ever sent (all credit to Dang and Co for being extremely kind and consistent in supporting my inner troll rehabilitation effort).
There is no site mechanism to alert moderators about @mentions, and due to sheer volume of messages the site operators will typically never get to see your well-intentioned message.
This thread does have better odds of being read than most, though :) cheers
I believe the standard for annotating the utterance of deities is red text.
Welcome, Tom!
Good luck Tom. I do not envy the people that take on the work required to moderate this site while remaining unbiased and I am glad you are ready for the challenge. I am sure you will do a fantastic job.
Welcome Tom!
Welcome tomhow. I really appreciate the HN community and the efforts from the moderation team at helping to shape it into what it has become.
Congrats!
Welcome!
Welcome Tom, Thanks for all the hard work you've done in secret and in advance for what you're about to do in open.
Welcome Tom - great to see, that both of you and yc cares for this important corner of the internet.
I immediately thought of the wrestler LMAO
For the kayfabe?
Good luck Tom.
nice to meet you tom https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.profigh...
Hi, Same Tom Howard from osnews.com ??
That's Thom Holwerda.
>He's still kind and thoughtful
Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some reason ...
/s
I was just trying to be funny but it's a point I'm happy to drive!
Welcome to the job Tom. :-)
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
Just trying to understand the algo...
You can see the front page for each day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front
Tom, please fix the flag abuse problem. It's gotten to the point where I realize there's no point in commenting on many threads, given my opinions, some of which are very normal nationally.
When I've found myself being publicly tsk'ed by the people around me, I've taken a moment to try go figure out why they disapprove of what I'm saying. It's been a useful life exercise.
Yeah the flagging is definitely much worse than it used to be. I’ve seen very legitimate LLM critical posts with lots of upvotes and comments flagged
A political talking point can be nationally popular but still political, so, outside the scope of the site.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).
Welcome Tom!
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.
I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.
Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).
> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away.
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.
I will assist in reporting brigading leftist commenters. There are many of us that want to see politics out of commentary when unnecessary.
I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions (cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance, etc.).
I’ll bet this will fix HN’s transparency issues.
[flagged]
You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened and how fair or unfair we were.
When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.
upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be tolerated in a civil society.
I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch
Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.
I think it's great to see more moderation from non-Americans.
My biggest critique of this site is that the user base and moderation seems very biased with American perspectives to the detriment of the non-American user base and the quality of content as a whole.
dang is Canadian.