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> I feel like I'm encountering more and more sites and articles where I can't seem to find the date. It seems to me that its become standard practice on market

• lvncelot 5y ago
  This is absolutely infuriating when it's meant to be informative, especially about something in a fast-changing landscape, like how-tos on Kubernetes, for instance.
  • pxtail 5y ago
    Very easy solution which I'm using when searching for something with expiry date is to look for date first and if it's not there then immediately leave site and not even bother to read anything there, if this is regular practice and domain frequently is at the top then after few times I'm just not visiting it anymore.
  • indigochill 5y ago
    > like how-tos on Kubernetes Honestly although I've occasionally derived benefit from these, I think I'm reaching a tipping point where I feel the plethora of how-to articles with their ads and newsletter pop-ups and everything are less productive than just some plain old documentation and taking the time to fundamentally understand the tech so that I no longer need the how-to. Mainly because I trust Kubernetes to keep their documentation up-to-date but who knows how current a random how-to article is, never mind the marketing bloat they're usually polluted with.
    • mejutoco 5y ago
      I agree. The date itself is irrelevant if the content stands on its own (if it mentions the version they are using, for example, or it features arguments explicitely). If bad seo articles stop being read (independently of date) better content, with proper versions listed and argumentation (like official documentation), could take their place.
• rjmunro 5y ago
  I've heard of some marketing things updating the date periodically without changing the contents in order to trick people and/or search engines into thinking it's new.
  • markdown 5y ago
    These days they'll change the title. An article with the title "The ten best pencils you can buy [January 2022]" written in 2017.
    • anthony_romeo 5y ago
      The ten best pencils you can buy {{ datetime.date.today().strftime('%B %Y') }}
  • lancesells 5y ago
    Normal SEO advice is to update your dates and copy so Google thinks it's "fresh".
• thatwasunusual 5y ago
  I have the same feeling. Actually, I've seen it in real life. A company I consulted a few years ago created lots of "evergreen content." Now, they had a reason to do so, but... It would be cool if archive.org (or any others) had an API that made it easy and quick to look up "first seen" timestamp for any given URL.
  • jrwr 5y ago
    Here is the API you are looking for: -- https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=example.com&timestamp=19800101 https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=example.com&timest... -- this will show the oldest timestamp of a archive that the wayback has. The trick is to set the timestamp to be /really/ old and it will show the first snapshot it has.
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      I don't think you can tell if "the text" of the page has changed since then without manually looking though. I'm not sure how you'd solve this technically, it's probably more than just telling you if the html bytes are identical, since small changes probably happen all the time to "the same article". Or it might be good enough, because this kind of content is rarely updated at the same url?
      • thatwasunusual 5y ago
        That is irrelevant, at least for me. :)
        • jrochkind1 5y ago
          Why are you interested in when the URL was first there, but not if it has entirely different content than when it was first there?
          • thatwasunusual 5y ago
            Because I'm only interested in when Wayback first saw the page. Nothing magical. :)
• stingraycharles 5y ago
  Just today I was reading a blog post about some framework (KubeFlow) not being “ready for prime time yet”, and even though the article had great technical details, the fact that it lacked a date made it so much less valuable: it’s highly relevant whether this conclusion was drawn last month or two years ago. I understand why this happens, but part of me really wishes we could stop this. Maybe there is some archive.org extension that can show me “this page first appeared on $date”.
  • mlac 5y ago
    If you found it through google, or search it on google, you can see when it was cached.
    • dmortin 5y ago
      One can even envision an extension which fetches the caching dates automatically and shows them right beside the search results.
      • madanswer 5y ago
        [flagged]
  • shishironline 5y ago
    Open developer tools and type `document.lastModified` in the console. Though this is painful for every web page, is useful in these instances. Maybe someone with experience in developing Chrome extensions, can develop one for getting this plus other useful page info by just clicking on it in the toolbar
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      why would companies who are trying to deceive not go through the trouble of changing the last-modified header? At any rate lots of sites don't set last modified anyway so that makes it January 1, 1970, GMT.
    • 5y ago
• samwillis 5y ago
  Just to add an interesting example of a middle ground, the fly.io blog post [0] currently top of HN [1] has the published date "hidden" at the bottom of the article. Their content is technical content that can go out of date but is also useful marketing content. The post is from August 2021 but has been posted to HN today. 0: https://fly.io/blog/run-ordinary-rails-apps-globally/ https://fly.io/blog/run-ordinary-rails-apps-globally/ 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083764
• saurik 5y ago
  FWIW, I started hating putting dates on most of my stuff because I simply got sick of people incessantly asking "is this still up to date?" because the date happened to be from even just a few months ago much less a year ago.
  • helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    > I simply got sick of people incessantly asking "is this still up to date?" I don't know what or where 'your stuff' is - but isn't that a fair question for a lot of topics? Writing about data structures or political protests might be valid for decades but a lot of technical writing about languages, platforms, even products and companies can age very quickly and unlike news or culture might be of less interest to people in the future. Many people find technical writings whilst searching google for a solution to a problem. I love the articles that have a date and version of whatever platform something is relevant for (even better when someone adds a "this was written for version X.Y things have changed in version X.Z see the doc at..." etc)
    • randcraw 5y ago
      And if you remove the date, people will still ask the same question. Inevitably.
  • worble 5y ago
    It's a valid question, you don't have to respond to them but at least if the date is there the user themselves can have a fighting chance at looking up what's changed since then. It's entirely possible a tutorial made for software 3 months ago or something might have outdated information if there was a new, backwards incompatible release, or that a news article might be missing information that was revealed only a few days ago, etc.
  • nosianu 5y ago
    Why not add something together with the date telling people for how long this information will be valid? Does not have to be a date, can be "indefinitely" or, in the case of software "until new major version update". Works best when you also revisit old content occasionally and update that information. I think you drew the wrong conclusions from those inquiries.
• ivanhoe 5y ago
  > They don't want it to look stale. But that can also be extremely counterproductive when the content you publish has a natural expiry date - and in many areas of expertise (pretty much anything other than pure marketing talk) things change over time. Potential client seeing the obsolete information might rightfully presume that the company is out of the loop or just plain unprofessional. If you have a date on the page it's far less likely to happen. COVID recommendations and measures are one such (rather extreme) example where many big players endangered their credibility because they've failed to properly mark the outdated content.
  • rgrieselhuber 5y ago
    It also serves as its own form of memory hole, if readers can’t get the context of the date after a few searches, they are likely to just give up.
  • sofixa 5y ago
    That's why The Guardian is a pretty great source for news, they add a banner on all old articles saying it's X years old, so beware, information might be stale.
• jzer0cool 5y ago
  I notice this sometimes also in academic papers. I would like to see a date but it is not usually presented. Is this for similar reason?
  • sebastianconcpt 5y ago
    In academic content, the lack of date is the most pernicious!
  • pjc50 5y ago
    That seems surprising - many citation formats involve the date?
    • KineticLensman 5y ago
      The problem is the downloaded pages of the papers themselves, which often completely lack proper bibliographic data (or even header/footer info other than a page number). Compare this with a page from a corporate tech report, where each page might have the title and document number somewhere.
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      They used to come in magazines, with the date on the front, and authorship metadata on the index. Nowadays they come as individual papers, but the publishers kept the format... because, why change anything when you have guaranteed profits?
  • kristjansson 5y ago
    Depending on the source, it might not be published yet, or the PDF you grabbed might be a pre-print while the 'officially' published article is behind a journal paywall. Generally, I take the publication dates of the cited works as representative of the age of the paper.
• albert_e 5y ago
  one strange example for me -- AWS has tons of training content they make freely available to their partners and wider community. In many cases though there are no dates! (youtube shows date of upload but AWS' own training sites lack such markers. We have to guess based on copyright year in the slide footers) It is clear that they invest heavily in creating new training content. In fact they essentially repeat the same content multiple times in many live tech talks and partnercasts etc. So there is no dearth of new content. It is also well known that they release new features very frequently -- so knowing how recent the content is helps a lot. But they still do this -- seemingly deliberately. They recently overhauled their whole digital learning portal -- renamed it AWs Skill Builder, built it using the docebo LMS/CMS portal -- changed a lot of things but didnt make any effort to add a published date to any of the courses. Frustrating.
  • lowmagnet 5y ago
    Their API docs are incorrect half the time because they rarely update them. Finding documentation on their dynamic parameter system that all APIs use dumps you out on one page with every possible parameter domain.
• bloak 5y ago
  BBC television programmes used to give the year in Roman numerals, in the copyright notice, I think. It has been suggested that this was to make it harder for people to notice how old the programme was. The same technique wouldn't work so well on a web site because you couldn't do what the BBC did and leave the Roman number on the screen for about 0.5 s so that most people don't have time to decypher it. Also the dates at the end of the last century were particularly hard to read in Roman. Here's an example. Time yourself: © MCMXCVIII
  • INTPenis 5y ago
    Like a true millennial I just entered it into Google and was surprised at the result.
    • kps 5y ago
      I was disappointed by [MCMXCVIII]; [MCMXCVIII in decimal] does better, but I really hoped for more like the unit conversion panel.
      • JMS2021 5y ago
        1998
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    I'm not sure how true this urban legend is but it is not too hard once you get the hang of it (And dates aside, how the program ages is more important)
  • LocalH 5y ago
    I got it in seconds because I used your context of being a date "at the end of the last century", see the VIII and immediately guess "1998"
  • meigwilym 5y ago
    > It has been suggested that this was to make it harder for people to notice how old the programme was This is tempting but I don't know how much credence to give it. It's more to do with a style that was taken on and kept. My father still writes the month in a date using a Roman numeral, e.g. 25/XII/21. The date format has been around for many years. There weren't that many BBC programmes made, even over the course of many years. To try and convince viewers that a programme was not "old" was difficult. It might be black and white, and the quality certainly would have looked dated.
• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Many news sites seem to set the content date to today so they always appear in searches, even though the content is years old.
• taubek 5y ago
  I must say that I put more trust in blog posts that put the notice "Updated: 10/2021") at top of their posts. This communicates to me that this topic was important at some time in the past and that someone is still taking car of the content and is updating from time to time. Stability and old content can be good. Not everything is being updated and not everything needs to be updated. I'm all for putting dates on pages and blog posts :)
  • narag 5y ago
    When they are just dishonest, saying that it's updated today or recently using a script is just as easy. They just lie. I was trying to find out why VLC stopped working for me a few months ago [0] and landed in a terrible site where they suggested to do a lot of cargo cult driver updating and whatnot. A few "comments" thanked the author for the comprehensive (and totally fake) information. This kind of crap seems to be winning. My other recent quest, finding a uni site about consciusness, psychedelia, emerson and 60s music, that I used to visit 20 years ago, was also unsuccessful. [0] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25976 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25976 (nobody assigned)
    • NavinF 5y ago
      On that note, Reddit seems to be faking their last modified date metadata for SEO purposes. I’ve seen many old threads (where all the comments are 5 years old with no edits) show up in my Google search results with today’s date below the link. This coincided with and is likely related to the removal of automatic thread archiving 4 months ago.
      • b112 5y ago
        This also signals an end game, where the last vestiges of true improved, customer facing improvements are over. With nothing left, one delves into short term growth numbers. Because of this, some indexes may de-stress reddit by date search, and, by freshness. And some end users will click, become annoyed more often, and stop clicking on reddit links. They clearly have nothing left, and no other idea how to improve reddit. They have signaled they are well past peak growth.
• pimlottc 5y ago
  There’s a popular concept in the content industry of “evergreen content”, meaning posts that are always relevant or useful regardless of when they were originally posted. The idea is that articles will have a longer “shelf life” if they are not tied to a particular date or recent event. Of course, producing true evergreen content takes more effort than just removing the publish date but that’s one easy way to fake it.
  • bo1024 5y ago
    Originally posted: <date> Most recent update: <date> Edit: it’s only a matter of time till an article stops getting updated. Of course I doubt people in the “content industry” (tell me that’s not a real thing) care what happens to anyone else after they stop updating their ‘evergreen’ page.
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      I see that a lot these days with "most recent update" that I'm pretty sure is a lie. Or maybe they changed some tiny thing to make it not a technical lie.
      • b112 5y ago
        Marketing is all about lying. Making up fake reviews, customer testimonials. Exaggerating (which is lying) about the product. Explaining how good it will make you feel, or better yet, showing photos of people very happy, using the products. Acting = lying, photshopped photos = lying, fictitious scenarios of use = lying. Lying is required to write a story (when you read a fiction book, you want the lie about reality, for it is fun to imagine.) This is a lie all parties engage in willingly. But marketing types have a sole purpose. To lie, but make it look like truth. So they don't care one iota about really updating an article or not.
        • nerbert 5y ago
          Movie with CGI such as Star Wars = lying?
• headmelted 5y ago
  Increasingly I feel like this is one of those pieces of metadata that we should be moving out of the page. I would suggest moving it into the browser (i.e. read a meta tag or header) but the obvious problem is that they’ll just be forged and it would almost immediately become pointless. Search engines could help here. If Google were to provide a last cached date (or a date of the last significant change) in the search result that would be far more useful. They certainly have this information from crawling, and it would be difficult to forge as constant substantial changes to game the system would be both expensive for the author, and harmful to the page’s ranking.
• api 5y ago
  That is exactly it. People are using recent as a proxy for quality.
  • mark-r 5y ago
    Even more true for open source software. If it isn't recently updated, people assume the project is dead.
    • metadat 5y ago
      To be fair, bit-rot is a real thing for software, because the world keeps changing. In most cases it takes effort and upkeep to keep everything working. Annoying, for sure, but this is the reality of software and technology as the landscape continues to evolve over time.
• bliteben 5y ago
  I don't understand why this isn't a seo penalty. I feel like early on with google they actively looked for things like this to rank sites.
  • supernovae 5y ago
    SEO wise most blogs will expose metadata that shows publish date and last update date.
• bleachedsleet 5y ago
  > It seems to me that its become standard practice on marketing type blogs for corporate websites to remove the date from their posts. Worse still, I’ve encountered sites that automatically update their edit dates to be current as a way to optimize SEO. I’ve found articles with decades old information claiming to have been written mere hours or days prior.
• mancerayder 5y ago
  It's a sad state of affairs that marketing needs drive Google. I can hear the "duh" response to that in people's minds (yes we know how Google gets revenue) but - this is the index to the world's data. The World's data portal. It has such repercussions that it's adjusted to suit the needs of online sales and marketing sensibilities.
• andrewstuart2 5y ago
  I've experienced some major frustration due to Azure's documentation doing exactly this. Though it may not be limited to Azure. There's just a date on every document and usually it's a month or two old. Many of the examples I've found via Google don't even compile or aren't relevant any more. I hope this is a trend that can be reversed.
• toss1 5y ago
  > I feel like I'm encountering more and more sites and articles where I can't seem to find the date. Moreover, since static pages are no longer a thing, the system cannot even retrieve the date the file was created/modified, always returns the timestamp from when it was presented on the browser. Getting EXIF data from images might provide a clue, but the image creation/edits often do not correlate with the text... If anyone knows how to extract such date info, it'd be helpful
• setgree 5y ago
  > the company will go though a burst of "blog productivity" One of the most insightful comments I ever read on HN pointed out that marketing folks are good at selling things, period, and that includes selling things internally. So when nascent companies are wondering why the product doesn't sell itself, the first thing they do is hire a Director of Marketing. That person promises deliverables from day 1, and what's more deliverable/visible than a blog? Then they leave -- in my experience, the typical marketing exec's tenure at a startup is about a year -- and no one else feels like putting in the work. Also, by that time, most people have seen that the blog never really drove engagement in the first place.
• nostrademons 5y ago
  I wonder how much of this is misguided SEO, thinking that if they leave the date off Google will assume it's fresh content and always surface it in search results, and not realize that Google knows exactly when they first crawled a page.
• rdegges 5y ago
  At Snyk (https://snyk.io https://snyk.io) we're actually working on a new blog process to refine this. Essentially, a problem almost every technical blog has is: when we publish articles, are they ephemeral -- or are they evergreen? If you treat blog posts as ephemeral, it means you'll write them once, ensure they're accurate, then leave them there forever. Unfortunately, with technology stuff, that rarely works. Technologies change, libraries break, facts now might be different in two years, etc. One of the things we're currently working on is tagging all of our technical content so that once a year it pops up in a review board somewhere and someone reviews it for accuracy, updates it if necessary, etc. This way, technical stuff will still be useful to readers (hopefully) a couple of years from now.
  • dariosalvi78 5y ago
    That sounds like more something that you would do on a wiki than a blog ..