[QUOTE USER="repto" TIME="1227152522"]I believe it's seconds, as the number syncs with counting between hitting the refresh button.[/QUOTE]
So it appears to be. It's still an obscenely large number though. This would imply the counter started 39 years ago. Anyways, looking at the code for quoting a post, the time used is very close to that number.
Those who guessed seconds are correct. It's Unix epoch, that is the total number of seconds since December 31st, 1969 at Midnight, it's how we track and store time on The Hive. I had changed the main page to show the time for only a few seconds, but it accidentally got uploaded, instead of just being on our beta testing server.