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Comment by detay | Hacker News Reader

And they have to have a publish date. (You wouldn't believe the number of blog posts that do not have one)

I agree. When I started with nixCraft, the first feedback was that visitors wanted to know the last updated date. Apart from that, having comments, RSS feed and newsletter subscription is essential. Please don't say follow me on Twitter or FB. That is like giving out free advertisements to social media, which hides your content from all followers who choose to follow you because of your blog post. I have over 250k+ followers on both FB and Twitter, but as soon as they see a link to my blog post, promote this post button appears.So please encourage your RSS and email newsletter subscription. Keep independent web alive.

The irony of it is that if Google's algorithm made sense at all (Why is a recipe being downranked for being older than one year?), people wouldn't have to do all of this stuff.

It's a vicious circle and I don't know if it's possible to escape at this point by any means other than inventing a better search algorithm and convincing a large number of people to use it.

That number is billions of people, which means that it's not going to happen.

That's because of SEO and perception reasons, I believe. It's intentional.

You are correct - this is an attempt to appear fresh. But it is no excuse. It’s still an anti-user dark pattern.

Fully agree. Also you can appear fresh regardless _if you are actually fresh_, simply by adding an review/update date.

Or if you’re not, just use a cron to keep the dates fresh

But... then what's the point of a date at all? May as well not have one.

I should have used /sarc

The idea was to fool people and bots into thinking it was fresh!

Yep. It is an intention to appear fresh to Google, so that it can rank above websites that have better content but are using dates. Users be damned.

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