http://news.ycombinator.com/classic is a version of the front page sorted only by votes from accounts over one year old. Generally the ranking is not too different, at least for top items. (I know this is not the same thing you're talking about; it just reminded me of it. Also note that /classic was created at a time when there were far fewer accounts that old; perhaps a higher threshold would be more interesting now.)
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.
Even old-timers rarely browse the /newest page to mod those up. This creates a bias favoring the ranking produced at /news because said old-timers will upvote those more than the ones at /newest (or /classic)
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.
"... 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? ..."
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.
Yep. I remember that when I saw the initial announcement (don't remember where), I grabbed my account name just incase I ever wanted to try the startup thing, trying to make sure that I could get my name rather than "some31337d00d_27".
It was on the reddit front page when pg made it public a long time ago. Well, 2027 days ago according to my created field. The only way to have an account older than 2027 days (as of today) is if you were in YC before news.yc was public.
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.
I'm at 730 days and I can support 1337 days, so long as I can read. I don't mind waiting just shy of two to be able to comment so long as the comment and post quality is exceptional.
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.
Or, as humans would say that, the cutoff could be the youngest of 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.
If you go to the URL in the code, it defines what a leader is: the 100 people with the highest karma. By define get_leaders I meant write the scraper, not come up with the definition. Heh!
2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.
2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.
2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.
2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.
2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.
2012. edw519, too busy building to comment. Community: Where have all the old timers gone?