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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

Moderators often resubmit submissions with fake time. (I pretty much hate this. I don't like people lying things about me, like I was using HN at a time I wasn't. Be aware of this.)

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Why?

It's an invasion of privacy. Imagine that a post appears under your name with a date/time where you are supposed to be working. If you are paid by somebody else, this may get you into trouble, or even fired.

In fairness in such an extreme situation it seems likely there would be a conversation where you'd have the opportunity to explain.

If there weren't, well, probably you're better off?

> If there weren't, well, probably you're better off?

That’s for the person to do something with or not. :) Not something that moderators should intervene in indirectly.

How do you explain if you're not aware of the policy?

There is no privacy invasion here (that isn't even the right argument). If you think that HN misrepresents the data then sure that's a valid concern, but it's not a privacy invasion. But really, the HN date is when it got exposed initially.

It does suggest that an "(updated)" marker would not go amiss.

I won't explain my justification, since I'm supposed to be working right now. ;-)

Fortunately the moderation here isn't a faceless monolith and if you email them they would most likely be happy to cooperate with your concerns about this.

You’ve definitely described an invasion of privacy, just not one perpetrated by HN.

pretty sure it's because HN's position/rank algorithm is heavily weighted towards post age. so if it got upmodded but retained yesterday's timestamp it would not get much hang time.

(speaking as someone with a few previous second-chance submissions)

As dang explains in one of the linked posts, it's because if they don't do it, the discussion usually becomes "how is this on the front page when it's 2 days old?" instead of discussing the topic at hand.

Of course in this case we're now discussing the opposite question and still not discussing the topic at hand.

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