Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

1,825 pointsdang462 comments

Hi all,

Tom Howard is going public as HN moderator today. He has been doing HN moderation work for years 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'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)

I've known Tom since he was sctb's and my batchmate back in YC W09. Many of you know him as the kind and thoughtful community member tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward). He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhow), the same way I switched to dang when I went through this rite of passage years ago.

Below is a bit from Tom about himself. Please join me in welcoming him to this new status which he was crazy enough to say yes to!

---

YC and HN have been a huge part of my life for nearly two decades. I read pg's essay How to Start a Startup in 2005 after my friend (and later, co-founder) Fenn found it on Slashdot, and it opened our eyes as to how to go about building products and companies. I first signed up in late 2007, and since then HN has been the place I come to find interesting news and discussions.

Hacker News gave me a window into the big wide world of technology and startups, that had previously seemed so remote and opaque from where I lived (and still live) in Australia. We were lucky enough to be accepted into the W09 batch of YC, and since then HN has been a place where we could share announcements about the startup, but also where I could share the challenges and struggles I experienced in the startup journey and other aspects of life, particularly to do with health and wellbeing.

From the discussions that have happened about these topics I've ended up making enduring friendships with people all over the world, and have been able to learn many things that have improved my life in profound ways. I love HN's ethos - of being a place people come to engage their curiosity. That's what it's always been for me and what I hope I can help it to be for everyone!

--Tom

View on HN

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 :)

Not to forget — of course — the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that must've went into cushioning the brain from the occasional nervekiller comment, as well as the endo-/perilymph for the overall "mental balance".

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

Indeed, from yet another Tom, glad you're doing what you're doing. HN is the best forum on the internet in no small part due to very active moderation efforts.

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

Thanks to you! We hope to keep the site great for people of all ages, but keeping it relevant for younger readers is something we particularly think about. You're most welcome to email us and tell us if you ever think of ways we can do better at this.

Welcome! And also I am so sorry

Tom, what a small world. Seems just like yesterday we were at Inspire 9 together!

Hey Sam, we first met well before that :)

Welcome tom, as a fellow moderator its not easy haha, I am sure its easier than Reddit.

Thanks in advance, Tom. Never a better time for more smart work in this area.

Best wishes! Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

All hail our new, most favourite overlord from the British Commonwealth on days ending in "y"!

I, for one, welcome our new overlord Tom.

Thank you for taking up the mantle!

> 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

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.

10MB page-weight SPA with the front page a 3 x 10 grid of image tile links coming soon. After all my background is in consumer travel and "desktop-like" business admin apps. I'm a natural for this.

The one thing that could improve HN is rendering fonts clientside on to a full screen Canvas element. Then all we need is a client-side framework for interpreting the element's pixels into HTML for screen reader support.

I dunno if you got the memo, but we're in 3rd of April now, no more jokes allowed, especially not traumatic ones like those.

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.

I have! It's very rare that I see a comment being flagged unfairly. Sometimes it appears as unfair to me, but then I try to look from other angles in case it's just my bias.

Also, don't forget that it's mainly other users who flag, not moderators.

Also also, it's a bit ironic coming from a 3 months old account with already negative karma. I believe HN has a problem with users who create many new accounts and don't bother to understand "what is a good thoughtful comment" and change their behaviour.

If you see a good comment in the [dead] state, you don't have to complain about it being "unfairly censored" - you can intervene to fix it by vouching for it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

That requires the user to reach the "small karma threshold". Difficult when the user you replied to has negative karma after several months of HN participation.

I have had showdead enabled for years and I think I can count the number of dead comments that didn't deserve the status on one hand.

Same.

I turned it on very soon after I setup my account. My own personal tolerance for speech is less aggressive than what we see here on HN. I dislike completely inaccessible history, and basic accountability is why.

Works like the trash does. Want to see how people live? Pick through the trash.

I suspect that dang has been barely surviving the (e-)moderation-technology debt (Arc notwithstanding). Good to have a second, antipodal, guy take on the burden!

Not many.

> 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.

This would have been an epic April 1st joke :)

I thought we were all bots?

Both can be true.

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

was really hoping the threshold is 65,535 because I'm much more likely to reach it counting backwards.

At 1 million you become a secret mod. Or so I hear.

If you flag, downvote, and/or vouch comments, you're basically already a moderator-lite yourself :)

Upvoting posts has a moderation-like effect (opposed to that of downvoting).

I dunno, I feel like that'd be "curation" rather than "moderation".

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

That is exactly what my brain auto completed it into when I read the headline

So, like if you were from Boston?

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 just assumed his name was actually "Dang" like he was Vietnamese or something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463012

I too realized this only like a year ago.

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

What do you mean by “oversubscribed”?

Automation, sure. But people need to sleep sometime, and maybe also have some life outside HN, for mental health. ;)

I think what comment OP is saying is that dang was working more than was healthy - “oversubscribed” meaning “subscribed above capacity,” i.e. “doing yeoman’s work,” “doing the work of two people,” “that man is like a machine,” “do you ever sleep, dude?” etc

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

HN is my favorite place on the internet. Thank you for making it so and keep up the great work! :)

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

This better not have any impacts on my capacity for mischief and shenanigans...

Anywho, welcome tomhow.

Congratulations Tom. Great to see the antipodes represented on the HN team :)

Welcome and courage tomhow.

Congrats Tom. Fellow aussie HN lover here. Keep up the good work.

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 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.

I agreed, and would say its stronger than that. Running HN well is great for Y Combinators reputation, and its focused on a relevant audience. I am sure that has to be very good for them.

> Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own.

Absolutely. It happens a lot.

Before even the "has a mission of its own" part, an independent non-profit needs to pay its bills. I suspect that dang & Co. aren't working for free. Similar for servers & internet connections & etc.

And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying for their accounts.

It seems a lot like the Emperor Joseph II - Mozart situation or countless others like it through history. You could ask Mozart to start a nonprofit, find customers etc. but it sure is convenient when there is a Joseph II around who appreciates the arts.

I hope dang and tomhow get rich doing this job. I'd happily pay for HN too.

People here see ads regularly which is how hn pays the bills. YC hiring posts and company launches are all paid ads in the sense that being allowed to post them is why YC funds hn.

I imagine 90% of users here would just block any ads anyways.

Over the years I've become quite jaded on non-profits personally. As they tend to appeal to the people who want to pursue an ideology rather than follow the goals of the non-profit. Which usually are at odds.

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.

Been here since 2011 and reading for a few years longer than that. I don't think the site has changed, more that the world has changed (a lot). There isn't that general excitement around consumer tech and programming that there was 15-20 years ago. We've gone from talking about how we need to start teaching coding in schools to how we shouldn't bother because AI will be doing it anyway.

The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to it.

On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy startups raising funding and trying to change the world. Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something loathsome 10 years from now.

I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to hold my breath.

I've been here since around that time and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change for the worse. The world around us has changed, political life may have gotten slightly more complex, but the community feels just as friendly, curious and insightful.

Yea same for me. Nothing much has changed here. I guess it used to be a bit more technical? But just a bit (I miss the Dolphin emulator status updates - they got me hooked on the technical content posted on this site)

The whole western world is different and not for the better since 2015. Erosion of public trust since then is tremendous and regrettable so it is not surprising that we miss the communities that once were.

So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech.

Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.

The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it.

Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.

I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be just another big tech subreddit.

These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.

I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.

> 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.

My experience is that HN's Overton window is probably on average 15-20% larger than most forums. That's not uniform across all topics though. So if you skew toward a particular set of topics it may feel like a typical forum, or even in some ways more constrained.

My feeling is it also depends on weekday vs. weekend, and on the time of day (or night).

My issue is it seems like something has to only be a bit controversial to be completely hidden from everyone. There was the recent DF article about how Gruber thinks his articles are being artificially shitlisted and I can't help but agree? I don't necessarily think the mods have their fingers on the scale, but I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm works in a way where if enough people flag something it gets automatically hidden, and there's enough people who see DF and automatically flag it that those blog posts get hidden every time.

Strong disagree here... While there are definitely those that will bury some opinions with downvotes, there are others that will upvote. Conservative, Libertarian, Progressive, Liberal and even outright Communist views get expressed in varying comments and that's just political leanings.

I only really recognize this because I'll be actively reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say -2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the total up/down votes just out of curiosity.

Then you're not spending enough time reading the comments on controversial stories. Disagreement is alive and well on HN.

I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.

Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.

Is that a moderation issue? Because to me that's more of a system / culture issue.

You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".

Moderation drives culture and should in the very least offset the worst tendencies of culture.

Otherwise, what exactly is moderation for?

I'm not sure about that, but a lot of it depends on what you consider to be "dissenting opinions".

For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.

Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.

I agree it depends on the definition. Quite honestly my vibe, and really that is all it is for any of us discussing this, is pretty much anything more aggressive than my comment above (or even including my comment above, once more people read it).

I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my point at all.

I think it’s a tough balance because you want discussion but certain topics have diminishing returns.

On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that this comment is currently downvoted as it's discussing moderation on a topic about moderation, so very much on-topic in this particular submission.

On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?

There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political opinion, and that is not good.

I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what _they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.

My understanding is that flagging does not imply moderation. When enough people flag a comment, it becomes dead automatically. There is, separately, the case that a moderator “kills” an unacceptable comment, but then it only appears as [dead] I believe (unless it was also being flagged by people). Someone correct me if this is wrong.

Little ironic considering you're the second comment everyone sees on this thread at the moment.

A sample size of one doesn't really tell you anything in this context. HN definitely has a pretty heavy bias in some directions, it's mostly that the crowd that naturally flocks here tends to mostly agree on those topics, so you don't see conflict too often.

There are some shibboleths that you absolutely can't touch or you'll be downvoted rigorously. But less than on other fora.

Your comment being downvoted for suggesting dissenting opinions are not treated well on HN kinda makes your point. I agree in general and spend less time here because of it. HN is still not as bad as many alternatives, but I wouldn't say it's great for ideologically diverse views.

The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual.

(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")

(Love how HN proved my comment as correct)

I think the fact that you're being downvoted for your comment proves your point.

HN does not welcome dissenting opinions in certain areas of tech where the individual freedoms of techies come into conflict with status quo social harms to non-techies; so, for example, you won’t see many HN articles about the ethical dilemmas of working at Palantir, how our industry’s libertarian foundations obstruct labor organizing today, what advantages the ‘bros’ receive in return for their misogyny, and so on. HN is a light-touch moderation site — as libertarian as possible, in keeping with our roots — so I certainly don’t hold the mods as responsible for the community’s defensiveness in that regard. In general, whether tech or otherwise, it’s not possible for a community to welcome uncomfortable dissent against its own underpinnings without a heavier hand on the moderation wheel than is cultural acceptable for HN and for our community. That doesn’t mean that HN rejects all dissent — certainly they may be other pillars of obstinance I haven’t personally identified and studied over the past fifteen or twenty years participating here — but, yes, absolutely, HN’s community has zero tolerance for certain dissent.

I'm like 80% sure this is trolling as a tee up for all the people responding with "HECK YEA DISSENT IS HAPPENING." :D

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 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.

Ah that makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. It's always interesting learning how HN operates.

Welcome, Tom. Are you a Neal Stephenson fan? There's a memorable character in Cryptonomicon who shares your name...

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?

Welcome! can we call you tang?

Welcome!! I was worried for a second that you were the Fallout Tom Howard, lol.

Nice! Thanks for the good work.

Good luck tom in your new role!

Congratulation Tom! :) Thank you for doing what you do here. Appreciate it.

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...

We're both paid.

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.

Welcome! Excited to be under your wing Tom! Thank you Dan!

Good Morning Oz! Congrats, you're on overnight duty

G'day! 24/7 SRE coverage. Yay! R stands for respectability.

I thought he was just a character from Cryptonomicon.

Tom has now put Australia in the spotlights :P

WA here, hehe. Congrats!

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.

Congrats Tom! Thank you for your service.

Warm welcome Tom! Hope it’s an easy gig.

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...

Welcome, Tom and thank you Dang.

Welcome! Just do your best.

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!

> 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.

Congrats and welcome!

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!

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.

Congratulations!

Welcome

Welcome tomho!

Congrats, Tom!

Congrats Tom!

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!

Welcome, 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.

It does feel very natural on Reddit (where mods can enable a flag/green user name when it's a mod response).

I agree, it helps make HN feel like a special place.

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.

I propose it should be based on the specified accent color ("topcolor").

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 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!

Welcome!

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.

>Fenn

Wait really? I've never met or heard of anybody else sharing my name! That's crazy!

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

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.

Well, that's an embarrassing mistake.

Thanks.

Well, it is kind of similar. And for a split second you really made me think it was him, so it's not that big a mistake :)

>He's still kind and thoughtful

Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some reason ...

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.

Sometimes you're right, sometimes they are. Sometimes, as the Rick & Morty quote goes, "Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."

Shouldn't that be directed to those with an agenda who and are flagging certain posts?

Those of us who complain about this highly targeted flagging just want to avoid censorship. I can't see how we need to reflect on this.

I don't think the person getting flagged is always deserving of the dogpile. Your comment implies "you should take this time in timeout to think about your actions" which is just a gentler form of rhetorical struggle sessions, and not always warranted.

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

Many people feel that flagging is worse than it used to be, but they don't agree at all on what should or shouldn't be flagged. That makes this feedback less actionable than one might assume.

HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.

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).

A lot of people don't read the Hacker News Guidelines⁽¹⁾ before submitting and deserve to be flagged. Quoting (emphasis mine):

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

How effective are vouches in this regard?

I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments, though I'm not sure how effective that is.

One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for each shows, at this writing:

- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.

- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.

The endpoints for the uninitiated:

  Posts:  https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
  Comments:  https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE&kind=comment

I'll also admit that at times that's a protest vote against mod interactions as well.

(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume, moderators as well.)

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).

Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators for people that use flags to further an agenda.

Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...

> 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.).

> cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance

All of which are subjective judgements on the content, which will naturally be reflective of a voter's political biases

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.

Right, so mods can claim it's my alt and ban me for ban evasion, while the buttkissers comb her history for anything too "techbro"-sounding to prove that she "had it coming". Not my first rodeo, Danny boy.

Here are a few shadowbanned users I saw in a /single/ thread (who don't know they're shadowbanned as they prolifically comment away), whose comments are pretty normie-tier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldpersonintx https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomohawk https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=techright75

(There seems to be extreme bias or unfair flagging by users simply because "old Texan" and "techright" are "scary Conservative-sounding usernames", yet you pursue the innocents being reported rather than the botfarms mass-flagging?)

It's all very "Everyone Stalin's sending to the gulags is a criminal, though, so keep your nose down and mind your own business." God sees everything, you know.

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 am firm believer in the right to free speech and the importance of expressing ideas that are contrary to the general cultural attitude.

That’s why I turn on the Show Dead setting on HN, and I love that HN has that feature.

Save your upvotes for people positively contributing.

Thanks for replying; I had positive karma, now I have negative karma and am lucky I'm not shadowbanned yet. Whether you agree with the comments that got this user shadowbanned, do you agree with shadowbanning this user for these comments? Because it was only for these comments and nothing else.

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.

I.e. North American.

I say this as a Canadian -- So he's basically Canadian-lite culturally.

I want to see more moderation from people around the world, with less geographic and cultural proximity to the Bay area.

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