6 ms·

Every work has a time context. Even if it takes 100 years for it to become irrelevant, it is still useful for people to be able to find out when it was written.

by marijn 12y ago

Every work has a time context. Even if it takes 100 years for it to become irrelevant, it is still useful for people to be able to find out when it was written. Books need a year, pdfs of scientific articles need a publication date. Doing your audience a disservice by not showing a date may have some shallow traffic driving advantages, but is still a dick move.

patio11 12y ago
Are you amenable to the solution "Put it in a header or give it emphasis comparable to the copyright notice rather than the title"? I think a lot of people agree with you in the abstract that it's a huge imposition to not have dates on things, but are unwilling to even right click to actually figure the date out, but they'll start doing measurable discounting of the work immediately if you do the typical thing and put the date front-and-center. I would also bet that people will simultaneously say they're not giving the date undue attention, mostly because people are terrible at introspection.
- marijn 12y ago
  If you mean an HTTP header, no, that doesn't work, since you never know whether the thing you get there is an accident or an actually meaningful value. Putting it somewhere where it doesn't stand out is acceptable. What annoys me is if I want to know when something was written (for example because the interpretation of a reference it makes would be different before and after some historical event), and there is no way to find out.
  - patio11 12y ago
    <meta name="date" content="May 19th, 2014" />
    - marijn 12y ago
      I have no idea where browsers display that, and if you require obscure browser feature or source reading for people to find out the date, you are putting undue obstacles in their way.
    - gojomo 12y ago
      That hides it from everyone but HTML pros, and even as an HTML pro myself, I'd typically not think to check the META if they've already designed the date entirely out of the visible text. (I'd instead check for 1st appearance in the Wayback Machine.) I suspect the best hybrid strategy, for those who feel dates complete a duty to the reader, is to put the date in small, low-contrast text near the bottom. Perhaps also, when minor edits occur, update one or more similarly-subtle 'updated' dates. That emphasizes the material is not obsolete/stale, but live reference material still maintained.
  - amirmc 12y ago
    I concur. It really irritates me that some writers feel their content must somehow be timeless and yet a year later it's superseded because something in the world changed. When I'm trying to research something completely new to me I cannot build up any kind of meaningful chronology using such posts. I do agree that the date doesn't need to be right alongside the byline but an indication of date somewhere on the page is important. Edit: As for people who devalue something purely because of the date, are these readers you really care about? I suspect there are annoying readers just as there are annoying customers.
  - tnorthcutt 12y ago
    He does not mean an HTTP header, just somewhere not prominent.
- syntern 12y ago
  Could you please provide more context on the extent of this discounting (esp. the measurable part)?
- protonfish 12y ago
  Do you think having both an originally published date plus an "updated on" date would fix the issue without being devious? The published date is important information to me, but if I see that the author has edited it recently it makes me feel that it has been checked to still be relevant.
  - Silhouette 12y ago
    I've noticed that some major sites where having up-to-date information is important, such as those providing financial or medical advice, have started adding a "last reviewed on..." indicator. These sites also tend to have very obvious markers saying "this information is no longer maintained and only for historical reference" or "this information is no longer maintained but the new equivalent is here" where appropriate. Personally, I find the indication that the information has been checked recently and is still current to be more important than when it happened to be published for the first time or when it was last changed.
- lacosan 12y ago
  pg's essays have Month Year after title, e.g. February 2009. http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html I think the cheap feel to blog posts partly comes from exact date (and time even) that's often shown on each blog posts.
- Tomte 12y ago
  That's exactly how I'm doing it. At the very bottom, just before the backlink to the home page, I have (in a smaller font size) something like "Original publication on March 2nd, 2014, last changed on March 16th, 2014". I don't have anything to hide, so it's there, but I don't see any real value in it for the reader. So I effectively buried it.
k0 12y ago
Relevant, timely example. What do you think about this: http://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-today/ http://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-t...
programminggeek 12y ago
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.
- marijn 12y ago
  > 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.
- davidw 12y ago
  > 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.
- raamdev 12y ago
  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/).
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
I like seeing the date. I get confused and frustrated when I see an article like "Simplify your web apps with JQuery" and there's no date of publication. Was it the first edition of JQuery circa 2005, or was it a recent version? At least when talking about a rapidly evolving software ecology, I think the date of publication is a critical piece of information to provide up front. If an author fears the "bit rot" effect, then why not update the piece and provide an "updated" date, e.g.: "Solving World Hunger with JQuery" by Blister Peanuts, October, 2010 Updated May, 2014 That magic "2014" cues the reader that there may be very recent, relevant information, and they are less likely to skip past it.
- ssharp 12y ago
  But by excluding the date, you eliminate the reverse: people being more likely to skip past it because it's not 2014. For some things, like your example, the date is very important. What solved world hunger in jQuery in 2010 may not work in the latest 2014 version. But in Patio11's example on salary negotiation, the date isn't nearly as important. Some information is relatively timeless. I saw a comment on HN today advocating that people read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "The Prince". These books are still very popular today and were written in 1936 and 1532, respectively. It really comes down to relevancy. If the date is relevant to readers, you should make sure it's easily found. If the date isn't relevant, why does it matter if it's posted anywhere?
tptacek 12y ago
Writing a book and selling it is just fine. But writing the same material as a free article on a website and failing to attach a piece of metadata to it is a "dick move". Thanks, The Internet.
- BoppreH 12y ago
  Books almost always contain a date. And while everyone enjoys free articles, there's still a huge future ahead. When searching for technical problems it's not uncommon to get results from over a decade ago. The internet is still in its infancy, so please, let's take all possible care to not pollute it. Note it only applies to technical subjects and other fast-changing areas. I wouldn't mind reading TFA if it was decades old.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Again, the Internet, that believes that writing a solid technical article on using advanced statistics to place ads but failing to place a dateline on it is a form of "pollution".
    - BoppreH 12y ago
      That's a topic I wouldn't mind seeing on the frontpage even if it was dated from 1928. What I had in mind was more like "Reading the clipboard in Java (2004)" and "Configuring Apache for maximum security (1998)". Sorry for the confusion.
- thenomad 12y ago
  I routinely check the publication dates of books where technical information will have changed, and recently got quite irritated when Amazon mistakenly directed me to the First Edition (2007) rather than the Second Edition (2012) of a reference book. In that particular case, the book was about the business and finance side of independent film distribution. Information on that topic from 2007 is about as useful as an article on optimising web servers from 2004 - there might be some useful stuff in there, but a lot of it will be seriously outdated and the landscape's changed beyond recognition. I also find articles on rapidly-changing technical areas to be essentially useless without time context. For example, I'll automatically discount any article about the more technical aspects of advertising on Facebook if it doesn't have a date on it. Advice that was valuable on that topic in 2010 is often useless or dangerous to your business in 2014.

by marijn 12y ago

patio11 12y ago

Are you amenable to the solution "Put it in a header or give it emphasis comparable to the copyright notice rather than the title"? I think a lot of people agree with you in the abstract that it's a huge imposition to not have dates on things, but are unwilling to even right click to actually figure the date out, but they'll start doing measurable discounting of the work immediately if you do the typical thing and put the date front-and-center. I would also bet that people will simultaneously say they're not giving the date undue attention, mostly because people are terrible at introspection.

marijn 12y ago
If you mean an HTTP header, no, that doesn't work, since you never know whether the thing you get there is an accident or an actually meaningful value. Putting it somewhere where it doesn't stand out is acceptable. What annoys me is if I want to know when something was written (for example because the interpretation of a reference it makes would be different before and after some historical event), and there is no way to find out.
- patio11 12y ago
  <meta name="date" content="May 19th, 2014" />
  - marijn 12y ago
    I have no idea where browsers display that, and if you require obscure browser feature or source reading for people to find out the date, you are putting undue obstacles in their way.
  - gojomo 12y ago
    That hides it from everyone but HTML pros, and even as an HTML pro myself, I'd typically not think to check the META if they've already designed the date entirely out of the visible text. (I'd instead check for 1st appearance in the Wayback Machine.) I suspect the best hybrid strategy, for those who feel dates complete a duty to the reader, is to put the date in small, low-contrast text near the bottom. Perhaps also, when minor edits occur, update one or more similarly-subtle 'updated' dates. That emphasizes the material is not obsolete/stale, but live reference material still maintained.
- amirmc 12y ago
  I concur. It really irritates me that some writers feel their content must somehow be timeless and yet a year later it's superseded because something in the world changed. When I'm trying to research something completely new to me I cannot build up any kind of meaningful chronology using such posts. I do agree that the date doesn't need to be right alongside the byline but an indication of date somewhere on the page is important. Edit: As for people who devalue something purely because of the date, are these readers you really care about? I suspect there are annoying readers just as there are annoying customers.
- tnorthcutt 12y ago
  He does not mean an HTTP header, just somewhere not prominent.
syntern 12y ago
Could you please provide more context on the extent of this discounting (esp. the measurable part)?
protonfish 12y ago
Do you think having both an originally published date plus an "updated on" date would fix the issue without being devious? The published date is important information to me, but if I see that the author has edited it recently it makes me feel that it has been checked to still be relevant.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  I've noticed that some major sites where having up-to-date information is important, such as those providing financial or medical advice, have started adding a "last reviewed on..." indicator. These sites also tend to have very obvious markers saying "this information is no longer maintained and only for historical reference" or "this information is no longer maintained but the new equivalent is here" where appropriate. Personally, I find the indication that the information has been checked recently and is still current to be more important than when it happened to be published for the first time or when it was last changed.
lacosan 12y ago
pg's essays have Month Year after title, e.g. February 2009. http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html I think the cheap feel to blog posts partly comes from exact date (and time even) that's often shown on each blog posts.
Tomte 12y ago
That's exactly how I'm doing it. At the very bottom, just before the backlink to the home page, I have (in a smaller font size) something like "Original publication on March 2nd, 2014, last changed on March 16th, 2014". I don't have anything to hide, so it's there, but I don't see any real value in it for the reader. So I effectively buried it.

k0 12y ago

Relevant, timely example. What do you think about this: http://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-today/ http://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-t...

programminggeek 12y ago

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.

marijn 12y ago
> 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.
davidw 12y ago
> 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.
raamdev 12y ago
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/).

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

I like seeing the date. I get confused and frustrated when I see an article like "Simplify your web apps with JQuery" and there's no date of publication. Was it the first edition of JQuery circa 2005, or was it a recent version? At least when talking about a rapidly evolving software ecology, I think the date of publication is a critical piece of information to provide up front. If an author fears the "bit rot" effect, then why not update the piece and provide an "updated" date, e.g.: "Solving World Hunger with JQuery" by Blister Peanuts, October, 2010 Updated May, 2014 That magic "2014" cues the reader that there may be very recent, relevant information, and they are less likely to skip past it.

ssharp 12y ago
But by excluding the date, you eliminate the reverse: people being more likely to skip past it because it's not 2014. For some things, like your example, the date is very important. What solved world hunger in jQuery in 2010 may not work in the latest 2014 version. But in Patio11's example on salary negotiation, the date isn't nearly as important. Some information is relatively timeless. I saw a comment on HN today advocating that people read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "The Prince". These books are still very popular today and were written in 1936 and 1532, respectively. It really comes down to relevancy. If the date is relevant to readers, you should make sure it's easily found. If the date isn't relevant, why does it matter if it's posted anywhere?

tptacek 12y ago

Writing a book and selling it is just fine. But writing the same material as a free article on a website and failing to attach a piece of metadata to it is a "dick move". Thanks, The Internet.

BoppreH 12y ago
Books almost always contain a date. And while everyone enjoys free articles, there's still a huge future ahead. When searching for technical problems it's not uncommon to get results from over a decade ago. The internet is still in its infancy, so please, let's take all possible care to not pollute it. Note it only applies to technical subjects and other fast-changing areas. I wouldn't mind reading TFA if it was decades old.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Again, the Internet, that believes that writing a solid technical article on using advanced statistics to place ads but failing to place a dateline on it is a form of "pollution".
  - BoppreH 12y ago
    That's a topic I wouldn't mind seeing on the frontpage even if it was dated from 1928. What I had in mind was more like "Reading the clipboard in Java (2004)" and "Configuring Apache for maximum security (1998)". Sorry for the confusion.
thenomad 12y ago
I routinely check the publication dates of books where technical information will have changed, and recently got quite irritated when Amazon mistakenly directed me to the First Edition (2007) rather than the Second Edition (2012) of a reference book. In that particular case, the book was about the business and finance side of independent film distribution. Information on that topic from 2007 is about as useful as an article on optimising web servers from 2004 - there might be some useful stuff in there, but a lot of it will be seriously outdated and the landscape's changed beyond recognition. I also find articles on rapidly-changing technical areas to be essentially useless without time context. For example, I'll automatically discount any article about the more technical aspects of advertising on Facebook if it doesn't have a date on it. Advice that was valuable on that topic in 2010 is often useless or dangerous to your business in 2014.