Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
Personally I've been here for 1472 days (3.5 years) and on the leaderboard for much of that time. I feel like the quality has gone through several up-and-down cycles, though some of that is probably because my tastes have changed too. Overall it feels much as it did several years ago.
The problem is not only the home page ranking: it's the discussions. I see a lot of low-quality (as in "it's more important to be right than it is to debate in civilized ways") discussions. I did not correlate that to account age.
2024 days here @wensing, No.
Being here a long time doesn't confer any special status. All it really shows is curiosity and early adoption. Other than having seen a wider range of technology, topics, discussion and behaviour the one thing I've noted is the number of high ranking stories sans comments.
I'd really like to can articles limited to point threshold with no comments. No comments, no value & shouldn't get the chance to go up the story leader board.
You already can. Just randomly pick a low item id, ie: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20111 and follow up the comments to the article head ie: "How to Build a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Man-Hours " http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19988
The sig/noise was different, fewer higher qual comments.
Sorry about that ... back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Secondly, I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but that would actually be a very appropriate age cut-off for what strikes me as a remarkably elitist endeavor.
TBH I'm fascinated to know how the community would differ from HN of 4 years ago, since all the older participants would be 4 years more experienced in life and hacking.
def cutoff():
return min([leader.age for leader in get_leaders("http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders")]
However, that really doesn't answer the problem when you don't define what a leader is. If it's the highest amount of Karma past 7 days, then the youngest leader could even be a day old user. Please respond with solutions, not http wrappers.
Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?