Half the web quietly stopped telling you when things were written
Search for almost anything practical — a how-to, a product comparison, a "best X" list — and try to find out when it was written. Half the time there's no date at all. The other half it says "Updated September 2026" above an article that still recommends a product discontinued two years ago.
It isn't an accident. Search rewards freshness, so the date turned into a ranking knob: tweak a sentence, bump the "updated" line, republish. A page that honestly says 2019 looks stale and sinks, even when it's still right. So sites either hide the date or fake a new one, and the one piece of metadata that told you how much to trust something stopped meaning much.
Old forums were the opposite. Every post had a hard timestamp nobody could edit, and old threads were useful precisely because you could see they were old — "this was the fix in 2014, check whether it still applies." The date was context, not a penalty.
The workaround now is reading around the article for clues: which versions it mentions, whether the screenshots match the current UI, the dates on the comments if there still are any. Doable, but it's a lot of detective work for something that used to be one line at the top.
Should a publish date be treated as something you can't quietly edit, like a post timestamp? Or is there a better signal for "how old is this, really" that I'm missing?
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