Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick.
But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.
I don't follow your conclusion. This isn't spam, it's just an updated timestamp. Furthermore: Google IS centralized. This isn't about decentralization, but about a central platform (Google) showing the "wrong" date and maybe even treating these blogs in a preferred way. Not sure what this has to do with blogs being decentralized.
Is the blogosphere dead though? I see links to tons of previously unknown to me blogs on this site. The community has moderated the spam out. Thanks guys!
It is "dead" in the sense that you are more likely to comment on the post on a third party site like HN or Reddit. A decade ago the conversation would be happening on the author's site, in the comments section. That died off because bots and click farms flooded comment boxes with spam and chased away legitimate visitors.
Authors of popular blogs didn't want to handle comment moderation, and once they started encouraging discussion directly on FB, Reddit or HN, it was game over.
It’s not just the blogosphere that is dying because of this „trick“. Some bigger mainstream media houses (at least in Germany) do the same thing to their news. They change the date and headline so often that you happen to click the same news several times in one or two weeks, only to realize „oh, that again, but with a totally misleading headline“
But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.