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It's pretty simple though, if you're researching a topic you need to be able to assess the chronology of a post. Without it the content becomes less reliable. N
by pknight 12y ago
It's pretty simple though, if you're researching a topic you need to be able to assess the chronology of a post. Without it the content becomes less reliable. Now you have to second guess the content to know whether it's still relevant/current and where it slots into other resources. Where's proof that losing the date improves ROI/readership/etc. Let's just be honest about our content.
- tptacek 12y agoCalling a piece of writing a "tutorial" and putting it in an index of "tutorials" and leaving it out of ones "blog archive" isn't dishonest; neither, for that matter, is not putting a prominent dateline on it. Bluntly: you didn't pay for a dateline and I don't owe it to you.
- pknight 12y agoYou are joking I hope? >> you didn't pay for a dateline and I don't owe it to you. Supplying date meta is as basic as having contrast between your font and background and having font set at a legible size. "Because you don't owe it to a reader" does not really make for sound reasoning if you ask me. The nomenclature of content is mostly irrelevant to this. It doesn't matter what you call it, an essay, article or tutorial. Still benefits from date meta. Case in point: any luck finding tutorials for say, a recent version of backbone.js? You have to look hard as most of are out of date and even if they are up to date, it's hard to tell (knowing when a piece of content has been updated is just as important). Hiding the date meta just makes it all the harder and it's reader-hostile. If you are writing about a topic, it's to benefit a person looking into a topic. I think some people are missing the point of creating the content in the first place.
- tptacek 12y agoNo, I'm not joking.
- pknight 12y agoCare to provide some logic instead of downvoting all my comments?
- tptacek 12y agoI haven't downvoted any of your comments.
- ihaveqvestion 12y agoI think tptacek is thinking of content with longevity, such as essays - observations of human behavior, for example, wouldn't benefit much from a date. He's damaging his argument by calling them "tutorials", which you and I associate with learning particular tools which will soon be out-of-date.
- pknight 12y agoThe type of content does not matter, can you think of any significant written work pre-internet that purposely obfuscates when it was written? Even an encyclopedia isn't shy about when it's written. If you want your content to appear valuable vs less valuable, write the hell out of your content. Make it impossible to discount the content by making it stand out. In science, researchers don't cherry pick and refer studies written in the last 5 years. They go back as far is relevant. They will refer back to hallmark papers regardless how old. Same with nonfiction books. Same with well written blog posts, because good blog authors often cite references to give the proper context. That's kind of the point of blogging, the power of linking and building upon what has already written. But making a piece of content float in some unspecified time vortex disrupts that. What's more is that a clear date indicates that the author wrote it at a certain time. It makes it harder to distinguish people that copy content or write about similar copycat ideas from their more original authors. For what it's worth, I'm not against the idea of situating your content in the best way possible. I think using categorization like tutorials/articles/essays is a better way of framing certain types of content. That can help the reader. Hiding the date meta is an attempt to help the author, while hampering the reader. It doesn't even add up.
- Tomte 12y ago> tutorials for say, a recent version of backbone.js I would hope that backbone.js releases carry version numbers. As a developer I usually know the versions of the tools I'm working with. But I might not know (and often don't) when exactly they were released.
- ihaveqvestion 12y agoI think you're making an assumption: that pknight is correctly understanding your point and disagreeing with it out of a sense of entitlement to a date. I think he is misunderstanding your point, partially due to the word "tutorial", which to me indicates something ephemeral (something I'd want to have a date on), or the word "content", which can be interpreted any way. By failing to appreciate the cause of his disagreement, you exacerbate it with true-but-misplaced statements like "I don't owe it to you".
- Poiesis 12y agoCan't we all just get along? :D I happen to agree with the people who are annoyed by the lack of a date. For most technical topics I research, I want to know when the article was written. Even for nontechnical topics, I generally want to know if the article represents the author's current thinking or something more distant. But I'm not most readers, and like tptacek pointed out I'm certainly not entitled to a date on the post. Since I am unlikely to hire the writer, optimizing for my happiness is not exactly expected here. Of course, if I were to be looking to hire the reader, stale content isn't really going to bother me. It could of course affect if I see the content at all (via a search), which I expect may be one of the larger points here.