This belongs here as well. Thank you to a dang despite my occasionally idiotic, off-topic slashdot-esqe comments that do not necessarily contribute to the font of knowledge that is this site.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;letter-from-silicon-valley&#x2F;the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;letter-from-silicon-valley&#x2F;th...</a>

That New Yorker article is what led me to start reading HN. I don&#x27;t work in IT and am not a hacker by any means, but the quality of the discussions has made it one of my favorite places on the Internet. My deepest thanks to dang and to all of the contributors.

&quot;He renamed the site Hacker News, and expanded its focus to include “anything that good hackers would find interesting . . . anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.&quot;Well, that about describes it :3

For anyone looking for a Thanksgiving-evening behind the scenes deep dive, here&#x27;s some lite reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;letter-from-silicon-valley&#x2F;the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;letter-from-silicon-valley&#x2F;th...</a>Thank you dang! HN is one of the few places on the internet that feels the same as it did 10 years ago.

Thank you, Dang!The Hacker News community is my favorite thing on the internet - and a good chunk of its success is due to your hard work!

Thanks Dang! I have learned a lot here, met some interesting people, and am consistently surprised by the diversity and depth of other people&#x27;s take on things.Lots of good &quot;voice of experience&quot; to be had as well. High value.Appreciated.

sctb stopped working on HN last year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25055115" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25055115</a>

All other communities are money driven ad bloated and later sponsored with bunch of crap products. And motivation is to promote stuff nonstop and moderation allows it. HN doesn&#x27;t do any of those.

There are no communities like this because of Eternal September like phenomena. If HN acquires a million readers tomorrow, it&#x27;ll be unrecognizable very soon. Nicheness on its own creates valuable communities. Another contributing factor is the &#x27;appalling&#x27; UI. I love it, everyone else on HN loves it but an outsider is immediately repelled

If we tell you where they are, they won&#x27;t be there anymore

HN discourages the sort of clever-yet-unsubstantial one-liner jokes that earn a lot of karma on Reddit. It reserves the space for thoughtful discussions. Getting rid of the memes simply doesn&#x27;t fly in other online communities.I&#x27;d also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.I know of other rich and healthy online communities, but they are fairly niche.

I think that the major filter is this: In order to receive the main benefit from Hacker News you will have to expend effort in reading and digesting the content, and engaging in meaningful discussion where possible. There are much better places to gain instant gratification.

Not the same of course but I like the intelligent discussions over at metabunk.org sometimes.

Professional moderation is expensive.  Keeping HN as good as it is is literally dang&#x27;s job, paid for by YCombinator (who benefit from it by using it to recruit and then promote startups).

It is extremely tiring moderating a forum. PG even said it is worst than doing a Startup. And if you have done any sort of public forum moderation, you will know you could get burn out very quickly.

&gt; Why aren’t there more of these communities, and if there is I’d like to know.Come on, the Internet is vast, of course there are many communities like this one. But most people in those communities, like myself, do not advertise them. We do not want them ruined. You find them either by chance, or by invitation.

Many good reasons are already mentioned, but I also think a big one is because dang is here full time. This is job and he does it well.Almost all other internet communities have mods that just do it on a volunteer basis. If those communities are big enough to be vibrant, that also means that a couple volunteer mods can&#x27;t cut it. Luckily YC has the budget for keeping dang around. I would bet this place would be like most other poorly moderated communities without him.

Why aren’t there more of these communities, and if there is I’d like to know.

Then you haven&#x27;t been here long enough my friend. Welcome aboard!

It is neither normal nor sane. More like the Stepford Wives.

HN is insane in a good way. You&#x27;ll find so many people from various background with the most esoteric hobbies and interests. I love this community.Thanks dang for helping us keep the signal-to-noise ratio high throughout the years!

In an insane world, Hacker News is one corner of the internet that I find to be &quot;normal&quot; and &quot;sane&quot;. God Bless you Dang!

Yes, thank you dang - no discussion site does a better job of keeping the conversation open, relevant, and relatively troll free as HN does.

Indeed, thanks for keeping the community vibrant.  Thank you, Dang.

Thank you Dang, I never cease to be amazed by the quality of people and content on HN.May it live long and prosper!

Well, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s sort of like &quot;Reddit&quot;. Despite being a bunch of different forums, Reddit has a certain feel.Design choices in the software influence people&#x27;s behavior, as well as influencing which people join and participate to begin with. I imagine Facebook groups are largely different than subreddits for the same reason.I was a pretty early Reddit user, I think 2007 or so. And it definitely got worse, so by ~2012 I had almost entirely stopped using it.But since ~2016, there are a couple communities I like, so I&#x27;m back on there. There could be gems on Usenet for sure ... but I checked the forums I used to frequent and you know what happened :)

&gt; Usenet.But that&#x27;s like saying &quot;email&quot;. USENET isn&#x27;t a forum, it is a standard decentralized distribution mechanism owned by nobody (like email).Some newsgroups were a disaster even back in &#x27;90 and many were awesome back then. Most decayed but even today there are a few corners of USENET which thrive (I still read a few newsgroups every week with trn).

Yup, my account is over 11 years old and still going strong! Previous forums I used were:1. the Joel on Software forum, which was great, with a similar clean design, but didn&#x27;t last as long (Joel got tired of moderating it, probably)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.fogcreek.com&#x2F;joelonsoftware&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.fogcreek.com&#x2F;joelonsoftware&#x2F;</a> (now has an outdated cert :-( )2. Usenet. Epic thread that gives you a picture of what happened to Usenet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24772142" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24772142</a> (a flame war between drummers went on for 20 years, and one of them is even flamed 8 years after his death!!!)Random sample of how bad it could be: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;rec.music.makers.percussion&#x2F;c&#x2F;-EhOkArR6BM&#x2F;m&#x2F;9zRv-MEZHCwJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;rec.music.makers.percussion&#x2F;c&#x2F;-E...</a>

Thank you guys for all your well wishes. It&#x27;s been a privilege serving this community.(psst, thanks realdang)

Nothing against Scott, but he left! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21930336" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21930336</a>

Thank you Dan and Scott! I’ve learned a lot and definitely advanced my career and personal life thanks to the stories and the comments on hn. I’m so thankful for all you do to keep it this way!

Thank you, Dang!  This is one of the only forums I decided to stop lurking.  You have helped foster a wonderful community here.

@dang has been an inspiration to me in how to moderate and build communities, and im sure im not alone. his work may be more impactful than he realizes! Thanks Dan!

I think a lot of people don&#x27;t appreciate the fact of how terrible HN would be if the moderators decidedly to complete leave for a set amount of time (and I love HN as it is, just there is a lot of bad content that gets (auto)removed). They&#x27;re good at being visible only when they need to be, and so it&#x27;s nice that many users recognize the great and constant work they do.

Add my thank You dang to the list!  Your work is genuinely appreciated.

thank you &amp; Happy Thanksgiving dang &amp; everyone else :D

I&#x27;m not sure why you got downvoted, because that&#x27;s actually something in my post. Thanks for the compliment, and sorry for your downvotes. Take this thank you instead. :(

Offtopic, but wow this project is amazing. I just made Snape say &quot;I love sprinkles on my donuts&quot; and it made my day.

Dang helped promote my &quot;Show HN&quot; side project to the front page [1], and that in turn got it worldwide press coverage [2,3,4,5]. But beyond that, I&#x27;m super appreciative for keeping the community consistently amazing throughout the years.I&#x27;ve seen heated discussions here. Dang always offers constructive guidance when discourse devolves or gets off topic. It&#x27;s never preachy, and it usually leads to amicable results when I see it.In years past I commented in frustration that HN was at risk of becoming like Reddit. Dang said not to do this and pointed out a community rule discouraging it. Looking back, I was completely wrong in that judgment. HN is one of the few places that really hasn&#x27;t changed. There are brilliant people from all walks of life and at various intersections of our industry, all coming together to ask questions and share our perspective. There isn&#x27;t anything else like it.HN isn&#x27;t without faults, but it&#x27;s the best community on the Internet as far as I&#x27;m aware. Frequently informative, always entertaining. I learn more every day because of HN.Dang,<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;w7SRSzF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;w7SRSzF</a> (warning: audio)Thank you.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23968134" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23968134</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigazine.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;20200728-vocodes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigazine.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;20200728-vocodes&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hightech.fm&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;ai-celebrity-voice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hightech.fm&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;ai-celebrity-voice</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypebeast.kr&#x2F;2020&#x2F;7&#x2F;vocodes-free-launching-text-to-speach-service-bill-gates-barack-obama" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypebeast.kr&#x2F;2020&#x2F;7&#x2F;vocodes-free-launching-text-to-s...</a>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.larazon.es&#x2F;tecnologia&#x2F;20200803&#x2F;zdj5mf47zfc6rmci5aguhewxcu.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.larazon.es&#x2F;tecnologia&#x2F;20200803&#x2F;zdj5mf47zfc6rmci5...</a>

Thanks much @dang, for all the work you do for HN. You are a true inspiration for me to hone my own community-building and moderation skills.

I sincerely disagree, but wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving.

Dang, thanks. This year has been tougher than others, but you&#x27;ve done god&#x27;s work.

I don&#x27;t panic often, but I thought this must have been a send-off tribute, and I panicked.

HN is my Facebook. I don’t miss Facebook. I don’t miss Twitter. The only two social networks I have is HN and Whatsapp (for family groups).I hope dang has Ycombinator equity because he deffo deserves a part of the success.

I am out of almost all social networks. HN is the only one that I still visit for intellectual inspiration.Thank you Dang!

A thanks to dang&#x27;s family as well - there&#x27;s always someone sustaining us.

Thank you Dang, your levelheaded moderation makes this place great.

Oh, I&#x27;ve interacted with dang a few times. I appreciate your manner in which how you handle the requests. Thank you so much for your hard work &lt;3

We should feel gratitude for what we have.  And then chase the ambitious.  Easier said than done, but a useful philosophy.

Hacker news keeps me up-to-date on the latest buzz, the most interesting and unusual corners of the interwebs.
The value derived from the comments is usually greater than the original article itself. Thank you Dang.

Thank you, Dang for helping keep one of the few non-secret communities on the web keep feeling like a community.

Thanks for all that you do Dang! I really appreciate you!

Thank you, Dang! It&#x27;s hard to believe that the quality of HN rests on the shoulders of just one man – a Herculean feat!

Thank you dang.I really appreciate the moderation of HN, and looking back at everything, makes me appreciate it even more.

I&#x27;ve received a warning from dang a few times on here. Thanks dang for the work you put in to keep this place great.

Dang has always been a moderating voice. He&#x2F;she doesn&#x27;t just take action, but gives irrefutable reason.On the subject of being a better human, dang has been an influential teacher.

Thanks Dang! HN is one of my favorite online communities, in large part thanks to your hard work.

Dang has taught us that ONE person can make a difference. Be like Dang!

Thanks a lot Dang and Thanks to the entire HN community! This community is really my goto place in the morning when I wake up, in my lunch time and once before I doze off.What I most like about this group is that I can relate to a lot of the members who have similar experiences, stories and interests. This is the first online community that I feel I really belong.Thanks HN for &quot;making everyday a little bit better!&quot; :-)

HN has been my “home ground” when launching new projects&#x2F;products. It has helped me and my company tremendously.Dang’s mod work has been amazing. I have always gotten reasonable and complete response from them here and on email. I have high respect for them.I would love to know more about their moderation workflow.

I&#x27;ve had a couple links I&#x27;ve submitted that didn&#x27;t get much attention, followed by an email from dang that it was a legit post that deserved attention and an opportunity to repost the next day. Every time I&#x27;ve replied with gratitude and compliments, and he was gracious, helpful, and humble.Those interactions and attention to moderation keep me here. Moderating this sort of thing is no light task and I have a huge amount of respect for those who keep it sane, fun, cordial, and interestingThanks dang!

Looks like he&#x27;s not <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21930336" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21930336</a>

I&#x27;m new to HN. Is Scott &#x27;sctb , and is he still involved in moderation?

Thanks to Paul, Dan and Scott for keeping the community calm and well.

Thank you Dang, for helping me with a show HN and testing an idea :)

Haha good catch. A bit embarrassing for me, but this is hilarious. Thank you for pointing it out.

&gt; The brain does a lot of its work in parallelWhat happens to me oftentimes, when not focusing on what I&#x27;m typing, is that I misspell words like &quot;theme&quot; as &quot;team&quot;. I think it&#x27;s because my muscle memory sloppily translates what my brain is hearing since it&#x27;s not focusing on the context, and those two words sound similar. This is also how &quot;your&quot; sometimes gets mixed with &quot;you&#x27;re&quot;, even though I most definitely know the difference and spot the mistake immediately when proofreading.

Normally, pointing out misspellings is bad form, but I can&#x27;t not point out that your spelling of “popping” was rather misfortunate. I think I know how it happened, since it happens to me all the time: The brain does a lot of its work in parallel, and in mine, at least, there seems to be a separate part of the brain responsible for doubling letters as I type. And this being somewhat asynchronous, it occasionally doubles the wrong letter. (I don&#x27;t know if the analysis is accurate, but the phenomenon is quite real.)

I was a lurker on HN for years before I made my first account here, and dang was a name that kept popping up all over HN. I thought you were an addicted HN user at first, but after a while I got curious and read your post history, and that&#x27;s when I figured out who you were.I genuinely have a hard time believing you are one person. HN being one of the most important tools that contributed to my growth as a developer and a business owner, dang I feel I personally owe you so much for contributing so much to HN. Thank you dang.p.s you are like a modern day good guy ninja. Hiding in the shadows taking out the bad guys :D--edit--Fixed a spelling error.

Thank you dang. HN has helped me develop in so many ways, and I will always be grateful for all the work you put in to make HN the magical, wacky place it is.

Thank you Dan.Dan also helped promote one of my open-source projects. I&#x27;m grateful for all that he does.

Since it’s Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it would be nice to say a big thank you to dang for his tireless work moderating HN.Thank you dang. You keep this community vibrant and interesting, yet civil.

Tell HN: Thank You Dang