Given the demographics, I'm sure the ratings will be used by someone for something. :)

I'm not arguing to show points. It's fine without the points. Just saying that old pages are valuable to me.

As an example, when I got interested in GitHub last year (note: I mean as "what are they doing in this space and where are they going", not "what does it do"), I seriously went to searchyc and went through the Hacker News archives chronologically, skimming every single thread that has ever talked about it; it took days, but it was incredibly worth the time.

This has become such a resource for this sort of thing, that I've been trying to "get to know" the people I interact with here, building a tagging framework (browser extensions) that I can use to add little notes to users, allowing me to get a better feel for who they are, rather than some anonymous user: if nothing else, it helps me remember at all times that these are real people whom I am interacting with ;P.

So yeah, I guess I'm rambling now, but what I'm trying to say is: the archives are important. They may not be something you use every day, but when you do find a reason to use them it is one of the most valuable resources I currently know of, and I have to see it labeled as something that there is no point in improving due to "lack of use".

Curiosity?