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A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends.

There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.






We need better timestamping services for this.

I tried to write out an initial spec here, but I haven’t been able to write any implementations yet: https://github.com/sebmellen/proof-of-origination.


> We need better timestamping services for this.

If I were to write a dozen blog posts today, and then straight up dump them on my blog, dating each of them so they're spaced roughly evenly since Jan 2021 to today, and start each of them with a preamble saying "I wrote this in my journal around [backdated timestmap]; publishing it now ([real timestamp]) as part of my 2025 blog revival commitment" - what would you say then? This little preamble explains both the sudden appearance and lack of any prior traces on the Internet corresponding to claimed creation dates. Are you going to call me a liar?

No, if someone with even half a brain wants to fake expertise this way, you won't be able to tell. If anything, what will give them away is anachronisms in text. Like idk. an off-hand remark about ChatGPT in a post dated 2021 could make you wonder.


But you're still a liar. And 'calling you out' isn't a prerequisite to (correctly) suspecting it.

There's this on the Bitcoin blockchain: https://opentimestamps.org

I guess you can use a third party like archive.org, if the blog is crawled by it, the owner doesn't get them to delete it, and there is no politically motivated revisionism going on based on the archive.org maintainers.

I would be suspicious of a reasonably popular blog claiming to have predicted stuff and not being able to back that up with an archive.org capture (or raw scraper data), though I guess it is somewhere where storing a hash on a blockchain may offer some benefits for edge cases.


If some one is determined to find out the authenticity then it’s possible right? Like Waybackmachine or similar tools?

Lots of plausible deniability

If I find 10 backdated articles appear out of thin air in Waybackmachine I'm not going to ask the author to explain it. It just lowers their credibility in my mind and I move on. I'm not interested in proving to them or in a court of law that they backdated articles.

Links submitted to Reddit or HN then a bit work as proofs of the publication date

since one cannot backdate timestamps on Reddit and HN. Hmm but you can still rewrite the content a bit


Yes this only proves you had something on a certain date, but not that the content has been unchanged.

if you're that popular, there should be some history in archive.org or archive.is



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