I'm attempting to preserve a record of when the views expressed in the comment seemed popular. Opinions can change over time.

I think it is because the comment ranking changes over time, and there is no way (without access to the raw data) to see what comment was ranked where at a given time.

Fear of manual moderation bringing it down?

Because it only took ~24 hours for this comment...

>As someone in the industry, it's almost certainly not.

... to be proven wrong.

Right. And that felt obvious at the time ... but if you don't timestamp it, who knows (later on) whether it really was obvious, or hindsight?

I also thought that question (Hindsight or Not?) might be interesting to more people than just me.