> quarantines for the Eternal September population
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
FWiW as an aside, it appears to count votes from December 2008 accounts (as just tested using this 2008-12-26 account).
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?
It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.
If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.
Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:
Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884
Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?