[combatentropy]

spacemanmatt, you joined Hacker News 9 years ago, and you have a lot of upvotes, which means not only that you have been helpful but that you have been here thousands of times.

So I am mystified by your comments. On the first page of Hacker News right now are seven submissions with a year at the end. It is standard practice to tag a submission with the year if it isn't this year. This is regardless of relevance. If it is on Hacker News, it is assumed to be relevant in some way. Else why would someone post it? If someone posted an article from 1888, they must think it relevant in some way.

Putting the year at the end has absolutely zero bearing on whether we think it is relevant. To me it is just another piece of metadata, like tagging videos, PDFs, polls, etc.