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12:43 AM

I have a precise "historical" question. Were there less restrictions at the beginning (2009, maybe 2010) to upvote posts? Indeed there's a profusion at these early times of highly upvoted answers. Or does it only result from a change of behavior among the MO users? — YCor 15 hours ago

@YCor Probably asking this as a separate question rather than as a comment would increase chances that somebody notices it. But maybe it is something not important enough to have a separate questions on meta.

At the same time, this is something you could probably check relatively easily by yourself. If you check in the Wayback Machine what the help said in the past, you can see what were the requirements for upvote.

Specifically, you could look at the page mathoverflow.net/faq on the "old" MO and at the page mathoverflow.net/help/privileges after joining the SE network.

At the moment, one needs 15 reputation points to vote up. mathoverflow.net/help/privileges

In July 2013 and August 2013 I see there the requirement of 15 reputation points to vote up.

The oldest snapshot of the FAQ from October 2009 says 15 reputation point. In the same in the first half of 2013.

Unrelated to restrictions, one would expect the oldest questions to have more views and more votes (higher score).

The oldest questions had longer time to gain views and votes.

At least some stats can be found here:

A: Does the number of answers really drop over years?

I do not really have an answer, but let me at least provide some further SEDE queries, so that we have more data. (I only know very basics of SQL, but I hope that somebody more knowledgeable might have a look and spot if I made some mistakes in the queries. I have checked at least some of the num...