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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a tangent but it always annoys me when content has no published date next to it. There's a tiny "last updated" date at the bottom. But how do we know if this is a new article or one from a few years back? With technology moving so fast it can significantly change the context in which you read an article.

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It’s an old engagement trick. The classic advice is to hide publish dates because you might lose some people who don’t want to read old posts.

Which isn’t helpful if you’re a person who doesn’t want to read old posts.

I'm actually biased towards older articles, given the rise of SEO oriented writing, and now, LLM generated content. Standing against the test of time should be a badge of honor. But readers like me may be the minority.

That's a good point, though it doesn't help if you're researching a new technology unfortunately.

Yes, unfortunately. I hope though that LLM's reliance on training data would at least give human writers an advantage when it comes to novel content such as new tech.

Yes this does seems to be more common. What are basically blog posts with no date to be found at all, at least this has a "last updated".

I can only assume "old" pages are down-ranked more by Google than those with no date at all.

Maybe the content date is in a metadata tag somewhere, I've not bothered to check yet. But if it is why not make it visible on the page as well?

Yes, we had to remove the publication date from our archives because Google was heavily down ranking it. We left an “updated” date but are probably going to remove that as well. I fought hard against this until it became clear there really was no other option.

Generate the date dynamically client side so it can't be parsed. Or use an image/svg

Client side JS is absolutely no impediment to Google’s web crawler but using an image or svg might work!

This is one of the indicators of whether a source is credible or not. Traditional newspapers always include an original publication date and a "last updated" date, along with notes—such as an "Editor's note" or "Update"—to indicate factual corrections or major changes to the article.

What qualifies as a major change can be subjective at times: there have been controversies where newspapers change an inaccurate headline without notice and larger controversies where there is a "stealth edit" that many readers believe should have been publicized. But this expectation that there should be transparency with edits should be the norm.

I believe that articles on personal websites and blogs can only gain by following the practice, too, as it's an indicator to the reader that the author cares about transparency and accuracy.

My heuristic (especially for bigger, better indexed websites) is whenever archive.org first saw it

There are content creator "experts" going around telling their clients to take dates off of everything to make their content "evergreen" to keep engagement up. It's infuriating.

That and the randomly updated dates with no changes

Not sure how Google actually indexes sites, but it would be great if you could see a "last changed" indicator in Chrome. That would be super useful.

Even if they had mentioned a published date, how can you be REALLY sure that actually IS the published date? There is always that dicey nature of internet which makes it untrustworthy.

> Last updated 2024-06-26 UTC

Located at the bottom of the page.

Typically if a page is no longer relevant but recently updated (like this page was), it would be denoted as such right up top.

I did mention that, but it doesn't mean it was first published then. It could have been first published years ago, and then recently edited to fix a typo.

How do I know the last updated time isn't just new Date()? After all it would be true the last time the page was updated is today. What was updated? The last updated time.

They could have rebuilt the page with a new template or something. knowing the original pub date is kind of important for placing the decision in context.

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