A commanding percentage of all citations of me on e.g. Twitter will apologize to the user's own audience for the age of the piece, in a way which is obviously suboptimal.
I have updated my opinion accordingly: I agree that in the case of actually timeless content, hiding the date benefits both the reader (who would otherwise discount the information) and the author (whose work would otherwise be perceived as less valuable than it actually is).
It doesn't matter if Marcus Aurelius wrote his Mediations in the 160s or 170s (or the 1700s for that matter) as they truly are timeless!
However, I've run into articles that were very much not timeless, e.g. technical tutorials which were hopelessly out of date, with no indication that this was the case (since they hid the date). In such cases, hiding the date benefits neither reader nor author.
Presumably you did not mean that date-hiding should be implemented universally. I'm just sharing those experiences, which led me to associate missing dates in articles with confusion and frustration -- since those are the only ones that elicited a strong response: when I needed it, and when it wasn't there! The cases when the date didn't matter, but was there, left no lasting impression.
I'm glad your proposed solution was "Spend a few hours monkeying around in Jekyll to make dates radically less prominent [and] somehow alter the URL structure to take them out of URLs" — my conscience is repulsed by the thought of removing the date information entirely. It should be there for people who are actively seeking it out.
It doesn't matter if Marcus Aurelius wrote his Mediations in the 160s or 170s (or the 1700s for that matter) as they truly are timeless!
However, I've run into articles that were very much not timeless, e.g. technical tutorials which were hopelessly out of date, with no indication that this was the case (since they hid the date). In such cases, hiding the date benefits neither reader nor author.
Presumably you did not mean that date-hiding should be implemented universally. I'm just sharing those experiences, which led me to associate missing dates in articles with confusion and frustration -- since those are the only ones that elicited a strong response: when I needed it, and when it wasn't there! The cases when the date didn't matter, but was there, left no lasting impression.