Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

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I hadn't heard of patio11's points against it. So I looked it up.

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.

A commanding percentage of all citations of me on e.g. Twitter will apologize to the user's own audience for the age of the piece, in a way which is obviously suboptimal.

For examples, see this thread: https://x.com/patio11/status/1234141833661440001

The thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234141833661440001.html

I have updated my opinion accordingly: I agree that in the case of actually timeless content, hiding the date benefits both the reader (who would otherwise discount the information) and the author (whose work would otherwise be perceived as less valuable than it actually is).

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However, I've run into articles that were very much not timeless, e.g. technical tutorials which were hopelessly out of date, with no indication that this was the case (since they hid the date).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.

I'm glad your proposed solution was "Spend a few hours monkeying around in Jekyll to make dates radically less prominent [and] somehow alter the URL structure to take them out of URLs" — my conscience is repulsed by the thought of removing the date information entirely. It should be there for people who are actively seeking it out.

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