Well, I thought maybe I should care, even if the request was unreasonable; but then I looked at some of the irritated people's comment histories, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Generally the comments I'm proud of tend to have more dates rather than less dates, because often they either provide verifiable information about things that have happened in the past at specific times, or cite specific sources, including the publication date. I think comments like that are more valuable than comments that simply take a position or state a complaint.

Consider, for example, this overview of the historical development of delay slots in RISC architectures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44503609, or this discussion of what GlobalFoundries' prospects for developing a 7nm node really were when they abandoned it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44503245, or this summary of the causes for the antibacterial properties of honey and the evidence for its astounding shelf-stability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495658, or this brief history of the ideology of pre-Satoshi cryptocurrencies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44471683.

These are all within the last week. I'm pleased with how each of those comments came out, and, although the last one went relatively unnoticed (probably because it was deep in a contentious thread), all of the others were very well received.

However, presumably not by the sort of people who are more interested in how other people format their comments than they are in biochemistry, archaeology, or computer architecture. Which is fine with me. Different people have different interests, and some people evidently have a very strong interest in how other people format their dates, and don't have much to contribute on topics like computer architecture. Possibly this isn't the right site for them, and if so, they'll figure that out sooner or later, and go criticize other people's comment formatting elsewhere.

Sooner, I hope, because I'm really not interested in their opinions.