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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Here's an important point about dates. Do your customers care? Does preserving some notion of temporal context deliver more value to your customers or sales of your product than not having it does?

Decisions should be made to support the intended goal of whatever you are doing. A lot of creative work does not have a date stamp front and center and people still enjoy it.

For example, when a movie like Terminator 2 is played on TV, do you watch it? Sure. Do you freak out if you start in the middle of the movie because you don't get to see the opening credits? Are you annoyed that you don't have the date stamp on every frame so that you KNOW when the movie was produced?

We technical people might care a bit too much about formats and things, but to a normal, non-technical person i.e. most of your customers, they probably don't care. Most people don't check the copyright date on books or look up the year a movie was produced on IMDB.

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No. The date matters. A lot.

When I open a paper book or a blog post, the first thing I want to know is, "When was this published?" That immediately gives me context as to the state of the world when this was written.

This is a no-brainer when it comes to technical publications because technology is changing so rapidly but it's equally as true with any other type of publication (even fiction to some extend, but much less so than non-fiction; the same goes for movies: entertainment is not as time-sensitive as a documentary).

A date of publication provides context for the reader to know what world the author was living in when he/she was writing. That's very relevant.

On my personal site, I put the year of every post right in the permalink (e.g., example.com/2014/my-new-post/).

That feels weird.

I only check a book's date when I'm trying to find out which edition I'm holding in my hands. It happens about once or twice times a year that I want to know that (admittedly more often in the last year since I was citing books in an academic setting).

Otherwise some imprecise idea about the publication date (Which decade? Possibly even less granular) might be interesting, but it's usually obvious from the layout, typesetting and so on.

I've really never wanted to know if a book was printed in 2008 or 2011, just to put the content into context.

> I've really never wanted to know if a book was printed in 2008 or 2011, just to put the content into context.

I have. I'm quite interested in financial crash literature and the difference in context between a 2008 perspective (which may be interesting in its own way) and 2011 looking back at 2008 is pretty large.

Edit to add:

That isn't to say the article is wrong, I think well organised permanent content can probably live well without a date on it. There are definitely items of content for which a date is important but for others I can easily believe it would detract.

> Are you annoyed that you don't have the date stamp on every frame so that you KNOW when the movie was produced?

Clearly, no one is suggesting any such thing. For movies, there's IMDB to find such things out. For blog posts, there is no IMDB, so if you remove the time stamp, you are removing access to a crucial piece of information.

> Most people don't check the copyright date on books

It depends! Would you buy a collection of essays about how to best market on the internet from 1997? Maybe, maybe not.

Other stuff is pretty timeless (hey, this Shakespeare is old!), so it really does depend on what the material is about.

> Most people don't check the copyright date on books or look up the year a movie was produced on IMDB.

Movies, not so much, because they aren't seek current factual information in them. Books, when used as references on things that might change, yes, most non-technical people I know do consider how new a book is when evaluating them for that use, often checking copyright/publishing dates.

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