Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021?
Textlog didn't exist before 2021, did it? (though you are probably making a general point)
Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge?
This is a really good point.
What was the expert consensus on the topic when the author wrote about it?
Also a really good point.
What meaning did this slang have back then?
True, but many people just don't care (unless you are talking 10 years in the future).
I'm not going to bother writing every quote-reply, but in this spirit, I wrote in another comment that I think I'm pro not having timestamps but now maybe not. I'm liking the suggestions of having very low granularity. To throw in an idea: rough labels such as: fresh, day-old, recent, this year, last year, 2/3/4/5 years ago, years old. Maybe even whole threads could become "stale" after a large amount of time, like a year. Very much spitballing here.
RE AI writing and slang, the particularities of the examples aren't so important. My point wasn't to comprehensively catalog of every instance where we're losing something by not having timestamps on textlog specifically. The point was that time -- even relative time if not timestamps -- can be used to understand a piece of content -- often they are even critical, which you get.
I like the idea of playing with granularity. I'll also suggest: one way to make timestamps available but less of a focus is to add friction. Require an extra click into a post metadata page that loads with a full page refresh. Any friction introduced reduces a feature's usage, and even as little as just adding an extra page refresh tends to be enough to reduce its usage by an order of magnitude or more. If you wanted to be particularly sadistic you could require the user download a pdf with that data lol
Comments
Textlog didn't exist before 2021, did it? (though you are probably making a general point)
This is a really good point.
Also a really good point.
True, but many people just don't care (unless you are talking 10 years in the future).
I'm not going to bother writing every quote-reply, but in this spirit, I wrote in another comment that I think I'm pro not having timestamps but now maybe not. I'm liking the suggestions of having very low granularity. To throw in an idea: rough labels such as: fresh, day-old, recent, this year, last year, 2/3/4/5 years ago, years old. Maybe even whole threads could become "stale" after a large amount of time, like a year. Very much spitballing here.
RE AI writing and slang, the particularities of the examples aren't so important. My point wasn't to comprehensively catalog of every instance where we're losing something by not having timestamps on textlog specifically. The point was that time -- even relative time if not timestamps -- can be used to understand a piece of content -- often they are even critical, which you get.
I like the idea of playing with granularity. I'll also suggest: one way to make timestamps available but less of a focus is to add friction. Require an extra click into a post metadata page that loads with a full page refresh. Any friction introduced reduces a feature's usage, and even as little as just adding an extra page refresh tends to be enough to reduce its usage by an order of magnitude or more. If you wanted to be particularly sadistic you could require the user download a pdf with that data lol