Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

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…

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.

In the classic tradition of thinking that “dang” is pronounced “dang” and not “Dan G.” I propose that we read “tomhow” as “Tomh Ow”.

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!

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. :)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome, Tom! Sometimes I can't believe how good we have it here. Thank you both very much.

Welcome, Tom! Thanks for supporting this community for so long. Your work is much appreciated!

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.

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.

> He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on

I laughed at this phrasing. Welcome tomhow!

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

May we please have another mod based within GMT to round out this follow-the-sun pattern that's slowly rising

Welcome Tom! And thanks Dang for tirelessly looking after the community. HN is one of the last few sane places on the internet :)

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'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.

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'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?

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.

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

Anywho, welcome tomhow.

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. :)

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! 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.

Welcome Tom! Thanks for helping to make this the highest signal-to-noise ratio forum in the general technology/business space.

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

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

Congrats Tom! And thanks Dan! (Yes, I've been around long enough to know the "G" is for your last name! :)

Congrats and welcome to the new public status! Forgive the non-substantive comment but that's awesome :-)

Welcome Tom! Wishing you good luck from this former Reddit mod -- I know how hard the job can be!

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!

I'm long time lurker on hn. Excited to see you as mod.

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

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.

> 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 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? ;)

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!

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.

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? :)

Welcome! can we call you tang?

Unsung heroes deserve praise. Cheers mate.

Nice! Thanks for the good work.

Good luck tom in your new role!

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!

Thanks for being a crucial part of this crucial part of my life, Tom.

I thought he was just a character from Cryptonomicon.

Congrats mate, hope it’s a smooth transition into the limelight for you

Tom has now put Australia in the spotlights :P

WA here, hehe. Congrats!

I thought it is an April fool joke about having Tom Holland as moderator.

My bad.

Great news and best of luck during this period of high tensions.

Are mods on HN paid or do they just do it for the love of the game?

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.

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.

Thank you for what has to be a tough job.

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

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.

What’s the purpose of having a less clear username?

A: Welcome!

And B: Just curious, what was dang's old longname?

Moin Tom,

Thanks for putting up with the work - let's go!

Welcome tomho!

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

Congrats Tom! Thank you for your service.

Congrats! Keep on making HN what it is!

Welcome! Just do your best.

Welcome, Tom and thank you Dang.

Congrats and welcome!

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!

Tom what was your company in YC W09? And how did it go?

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!

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.

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.

Thinking far ahead, is there some way we can train LLMs that will moderate the same way as dang?

Congratulations!

Welcome Tom!

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!

Congrats, 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.

Any comments on this post regarding moderation at hacker news:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...

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.

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!

Welcome, Tom. Not easy shoes to fill! Moderation can be tricky.

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

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