Hot take, but the microfeature I love in blogs and websites is a date at the very top. I know patio11's points against it, but from a user perspective it just adds so much context that for me it's a no-brainer.
I also really like dates on things as a user of them.
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/content-m...
Is this the man responsible for the popularity of dateless blogs? (I tried to check the date on the post but... alas! ;)
Just kidding, we still have the Internet Archive (for now) so I am able to get the same information ("2014") in a much less convenient way... (I suppose my willingness to do so removes me from the category "most readers?" Though that will depend on the blog!)
The argument seems to be "people will disregard the information in an article if they think it's old." I can't speak for other people, but I actually find the opposite is true. The older a post, the more likely I am to find it interesting, and take it seriously.
Same idea as this, really: https://xkcd.com/2634/
>>What does the red line through HTTPS mean?
>Oh, just that the site hasn't been updated since 2015 or so.
>And since it's been around that long, it's probably legit.
For examples, see this thread: https://x.com/patio11/status/1234141833661440001
It doesn't matter if Marcus Aurelius wrote his Mediations in the 160s or 170s (or the 1700s for that matter) as they truly are timeless!
However, I've run into articles that were very much not timeless, e.g. technical tutorials which were hopelessly out of date, with no indication that this was the case (since they hid the date). In such cases, hiding the date benefits neither reader nor author.
Presumably you did not mean that date-hiding should be implemented universally. I'm just sharing those experiences, which led me to associate missing dates in articles with confusion and frustration -- since those are the only ones that elicited a strong response: when I needed it, and when it wasn't there! The cases when the date didn't matter, but was there, left no lasting impression.