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Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by fireflymetavrse on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @06:01AM (#30084041)
Also, youtube videos sometimes don't have posting date in their description, not sure why. And I hate when platforms use contextual time like '1 year ago' instead of posting date.
Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by funwares on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @06:17AM (#30084152)
Could you share an example of a YouTube video that does not have an upload date?

I watch quite a lot of YouTube and very frequently look up the date that videos were uploaded. I've never found this information to be missing.

Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by albert_e on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @07:30AM (#30084705)
I stumbled across this recently and was puzzled.

If I find that link / another example I will share here. <placeholder>

But this definitely is a feature of YouTube where content creators have an option to hide the date. I googled and found the documentation for this feature.

Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by exikyut on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @10:45AM (#30086877)
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/4006094/how-can-i-...:

> Q: How can I hide the date the video was published? (Posted 4/12/19)

> A: That is not an option that is available.*

Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by ivank on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:42PM (#30089825)
Not sure if this is OP's case, but YouTube has the rare video with no metadata visible whatsoever (tested web):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0_4EmHLCo

Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by exikyut on Thursday January 27, 2022 @06:56AM (#30099414)
Woow, thanks very much for this piece of interestingness. What even is this?

Even ad rolls (if you dig out the video id) have some sort of interesting "noone will see this" title :)

And random apps on the Play Store also have video titles.

Adding the video to Watch Later by replaying the request using cURL seems to work, at which point I can add the video to a playlist to find it later (yay), and also click through to see the uploader: https://www.youtube.com/user/GameloftVideos

Except for the bit where it says "This channel is not available" using the YouTube design from a few years ago and displays absolutely nothing, the account is perfectly normal, nothing to see here.

Wow.

What even is this?? [Edit: just realized I forgot I said that above. I'm leaving it in :P]

Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by Hard_Space on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @06:05AM (#30084062)
This is very annoying. I write for an AI site, and have requested a change to the CMS, which changes the publication date to the 'updated' date, leaving no visible evidence of the original date behind. If you open up the HTML, the original date is in there as a token, but the casual reader won't know, and Google is annoyingly unpredictable as to whether it will display the date in SERPS (it almost always knows the date, whether it shows it or not).

I have taken now to including 'Original publication date' as a codicil in my pieces.

Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web? by slightwinder on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @09:35AM (#30085875)
Have you tried resizing the window? I do have this sometimes too and figured out that it usually happens when the other field-values are too long. Seems the date has simply the least priority between all the buttons and the view-count and becomes hidden.