zlacker

I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. Doesn't look like it.

I'm not sure if this measure means much... with no downvotes, if quality goes down, "classic users" will simply vote less often. That would be a decently interesting statistic: (page views)/(story votes) over the lifetime of older accounts. Not sure if that data is still available, though.

>>andrey+(OP)
I've been here long enough... since February or so I've drastically decreased my voting participation. I perceive that my votes won't counteract the effects of the (well-intentioned) flood of newcomers.

>>andrey+(OP)
Actually one of the surprising things is the huge percentage of votes cast by old-timers. For frontpage articles it is never less than 40% and sometimes as much as 80%.

>>andrey+(OP)
But it seems as if the new users vote on similar things as the old users, that is the interesting thing?

Although it might be fun to create HN/postmodern where only votes from accounts less than a year old are counted, and compare that to classic?

>>pg+S3
Doesn't this make sense? The people who are most likely to vote are those who feel like they're part of the HN community, and those people are much more likely to be old-timers. I guess this is somewhat surprising if there are many many more newcomers. What's the ratio of new voters to old voters?

>>pg+S3
Definitely not intuitive given all the old timers are feeling the quality is gone down and yet they continue to contribute for the front page articles to stay on.

Does this mean the problem at core could be with submissions and the moment it floats up to page 1 - which it would with just > 4 points in 3-4 hrs it gets reassuring votes even from old-timers.

PG, You should dig out the data on how lazy old-timers are getting in digging out material for HN front page :)