To measure any possible decline I created an alternative
version of the frontpage that only counted the votes of
users who signed up in the first year.
Unfortunately, first-year users will only vote on what they see, and if they don't consistently use the classic view - which I expect very few would - then they will most likely only vote on what everyone else has voted on. Thus, classic wouldn't be expected to be significantly different from the regular home page, and thus it cannot measure the decline.
Classic view (news.ycombinator.com/classic) looks the same, however the stories are ranked using only votes from older users.
The cutoff is either (1)accounts that have been around for more than a year or (2)accounts that were made in the first year the site was running. I believe that it's (1), but I've heard it both ways.
