Just a thought... I'm not sure why Baron wanted to delete old threads/posts in the first place. It could have been to free up disk space, or maybe just to remove some of the clutter from the site (an admirable reason, IMO). If things are to be thinned out at some point, the challenge is to be able to thin the worthless garbage (as others have stated, this is ~90%+ of the posts, and this is being very conservative), while keeping the good stuff. Certainly, this is a task that is impossible task for any individual to do, since they don't know how all other readers use the site.
A solution, IMO, is to introduce a rating system on ET. This has been suggested many times in the past, and maybe the time for this has finally come. ET users could rate the various posts ("Was this post helpful for you?"), as well as possibly rating the various posters/threads (although by rating posts alone, the value of the threads and posters could likely be determined.
In the future, with this new feature, Baron would be able to easily delete worthless threads, which would be threads that the ET community found useless, with few if any 'useful posts'. This might help cleanup, for example, the 100+ "Black Monday" and chit chat threads that have no historical value, will keeping the threads deemed valuable to the ET community.
I also think that this sort of community feedback would incrementally increase the overall quality of posts on ET, as posters would take a little extra time and effort with some of their posts, hoping to create something of value to their fellow reader (knowing that they'd see feeback on how it was received). This would be particularly true, if the system was designed to give an overall feedback 'score' to quality of posts from individual members (similar to how EBay has a publically posted feedback ranking for all users). This kind of feeback would also help the newer members of the community better determine which members are worth special attention and which are just full of hot air.
