[gwern]

I agree it's not helpful. The star marks a 'new' link (ie. seen for the first time recently in the website corpus). It's useful for helping flag recently-modified writing or new additions in my essays, where I might have added a bunch of links 15 years after starting the essay, and then the interesting new paragraph jumps out. They are 'starred' as something new which might be worth looking at even if you've read that page before. (Classic but forgotten Web 1.0 design pattern.) Unfortunately, in cases like this, I haven't ever written about pinball hacking before, so almost all the links are new...

I've thought about how to handle it, but haven't come up with a good answer. It may be that since 'blog' posts come with a clear temporal context, compared to my usual pages, it makes more sense to just disable that particular feature on all blog posts. We'll think about it.

[gwern]

Achmiz argues that it makes more sense to define each page as 'new' vs 'old', and disable the black-stars based on that, rather than on whether it's a blog or not. This is more work, but makes more sense (and we might want to do other things based on that binary variable, like emphasize the created date at the top of the page, to warn readers that something is recent and thus still half-baked). So we're implementing that now.