Of course, producing true evergreen content takes more effort than just removing the publish date but that’s one easy way to fake it.
Most recent update: <date>
Edit: it’s only a matter of time till an article stops getting updated. Of course I doubt people in the “content industry” (tell me that’s not a real thing) care what happens to anyone else after they stop updating their ‘evergreen’ page.
Safer to just publish a new article when there's a sufficient amount of content to update. Link the articles together somehow. Maybe add a disclaimer to older (and not updated) articles that they might no longer be valid
Also solves the problem others have mentioned where they don't trust the date on articles. If you have a solid previous article to link to, you're more likely to build trust that the new one really is new
To get even more nuanced generally a superficial update shouldn't change the "updated" time, this gives another level of control.
I think if there is a thing of any sort, there's an industry for it.
And if it sound dumb to an engineer type, it's more likely there's a lot of it.
Exaggerating (which is lying) about the product.
Explaining how good it will make you feel, or better yet, showing photos of people very happy, using the products.
Acting = lying, photshopped photos = lying, fictitious scenarios of use = lying.
Lying is required to write a story (when you read a fiction book, you want the lie about reality, for it is fun to imagine.)
This is a lie all parties engage in willingly.
But marketing types have a sole purpose. To lie, but make it look like truth.
So they don't care one iota about really updating an article or not.
"That's right -- and when you get to the human world, the Nothing will cling to you. You'll be like a contagious disease that makes humans blind, so they can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion. Do you know what you and your kind are called there?"
"No," Atreyu whispered.
"Lies!" Gmork barked
― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts
... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.”
His child books certainly have a deep second reading as adults.
After all, it claims the unreal as real. Fiction, lies.
The difference with things like fiction in books and movies, for entertainment, is that the listener of the lie, knows it is a lie, and listens for entertainment.
It is not a lie, pretending to be true.
1. "Top 10 novels inspired by Greek myths" (not tied to a recent event): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/top-10-novels-...
2. "How to make pea and ham soup - recipe": https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/jan/26/how-to-make-pea...
These are unlikely to pull lots of traffic versus a more timely event (e.g. interview with an author for a recent book release for the first section; except maybe the second as it's a regular column). However, the usefulness about evergreen content for a local print publication was to fill content for the print edition when there was a slow news week (not enough timely news to fill the pages).
[0] https://www.outsideonline.com/2152131/freezing-death
[1] https://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/peter-stark-and-as-free...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690468853/why-peter-starks-fr...
But that can also be extremely counterproductive when the content you publish has a natural expiry date - and in many areas of expertise (pretty much anything other than pure marketing talk) things change over time. Potential client seeing the obsolete information might rightfully presume that the company is out of the loop or just plain unprofessional. If you have a date on the page it's far less likely to happen.
COVID recommendations and measures are one such (rather extreme) example where many big players endangered their credibility because they've failed to properly mark the outdated content.
Stability and old content can be good. Not everything is being updated and not everything needs to be updated. I'm all for putting dates on pages and blog posts :)
They just lie. I was trying to find out why VLC stopped working for me a few months ago [0] and landed in a terrible site where they suggested to do a lot of cargo cult driver updating and whatnot. A few "comments" thanked the author for the comprehensive (and totally fake) information.
This kind of crap seems to be winning. My other recent quest, finding a uni site about consciusness, psychedelia, emerson and 60s music, that I used to visit 20 years ago, was also unsuccessful.
[0] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25976
(nobody assigned)
With nothing left, one delves into short term growth numbers.
Because of this, some indexes may de-stress reddit by date search, and, by freshness. And some end users will click, become annoyed more often, and stop clicking on reddit links.
They clearly have nothing left, and no other idea how to improve reddit. They have signaled they are well past peak growth.
I understand why this happens, but part of me really wishes we could stop this. Maybe there is some archive.org extension that can show me “this page first appeared on $date”.
Even for static content, the date may be wrong as the output may have been generated multiple times since it was first created.
It would be cool if archive.org (or any others) had an API that made it easy and quick to look up "first seen" timestamp for any given URL.
Or it might be good enough, because this kind of content is rarely updated at the same url?
© MCMXCVIII
This is tempting but I don't know how much credence to give it.
It's more to do with a style that was taken on and kept. My father still writes the month in a date using a Roman numeral, e.g. 25/XII/21.
The date format has been around for many years. There weren't that many BBC programmes made, even over the course of many years. To try and convince viewers that a programme was not "old" was difficult. It might be black and white, and the quality certainly would have looked dated.
(And dates aside, how the program ages is more important)
I don't know what or where 'your stuff' is - but isn't that a fair question for a lot of topics? Writing about data structures or political protests might be valid for decades but a lot of technical writing about languages, platforms, even products and companies can age very quickly and unlike news or culture might be of less interest to people in the future.
Many people find technical writings whilst searching google for a solution to a problem. I love the articles that have a date and version of whatever platform something is relevant for (even better when someone adds a "this was written for version X.Y things have changed in version X.Z see the doc at..." etc)
It's entirely possible a tutorial made for software 3 months ago or something might have outdated information if there was a new, backwards incompatible release, or that a news article might be missing information that was revealed only a few days ago, etc.
Nowadays they come as individual papers, but the publishers kept the format... because, why change anything when you have guaranteed profits?
Generally, I take the publication dates of the cited works as representative of the age of the paper.
An article with the title "The ten best pencils you can buy [January 2022]" written in 2017.
The ten best pencils you can buy {{ datetime.date.today().strftime('%B %Y') }}AWS has tons of training content they make freely available to their partners and wider community.
In many cases though there are no dates! (youtube shows date of upload but AWS' own training sites lack such markers. We have to guess based on copyright year in the slide footers)
It is clear that they invest heavily in creating new training content. In fact they essentially repeat the same content multiple times in many live tech talks and partnercasts etc. So there is no dearth of new content. It is also well known that they release new features very frequently -- so knowing how recent the content is helps a lot. But they still do this -- seemingly deliberately.
They recently overhauled their whole digital learning portal -- renamed it AWs Skill Builder, built it using the docebo LMS/CMS portal -- changed a lot of things but didnt make any effort to add a published date to any of the courses.
Frustrating.
If you treat blog posts as ephemeral, it means you'll write them once, ensure they're accurate, then leave them there forever. Unfortunately, with technology stuff, that rarely works. Technologies change, libraries break, facts now might be different in two years, etc.
One of the things we're currently working on is tagging all of our technical content so that once a year it pops up in a review board somewhere and someone reviews it for accuracy, updates it if necessary, etc.
This way, technical stuff will still be useful to readers (hopefully) a couple of years from now.
Honestly although I've occasionally derived benefit from these, I think I'm reaching a tipping point where I feel the plethora of how-to articles with their ads and newsletter pop-ups and everything are less productive than just some plain old documentation and taking the time to fundamentally understand the tech so that I no longer need the how-to. Mainly because I trust Kubernetes to keep their documentation up-to-date but who knows how current a random how-to article is, never mind the marketing bloat they're usually polluted with.
One of the most insightful comments I ever read on HN pointed out that marketing folks are good at selling things, period, and that includes selling things internally. So when nascent companies are wondering why the product doesn't sell itself, the first thing they do is hire a Director of Marketing. That person promises deliverables from day 1, and what's more deliverable/visible than a blog? Then they leave -- in my experience, the typical marketing exec's tenure at a startup is about a year -- and no one else feels like putting in the work. Also, by that time, most people have seen that the blog never really drove engagement in the first place.
I would suggest moving it into the browser (i.e. read a meta tag or header) but the obvious problem is that they’ll just be forged and it would almost immediately become pointless.
Search engines could help here. If Google were to provide a last cached date (or a date of the last significant change) in the search result that would be far more useful. They certainly have this information from crawling, and it would be difficult to forge as constant substantial changes to game the system would be both expensive for the author, and harmful to the page’s ranking.
Moreover, since static pages are no longer a thing, the system cannot even retrieve the date the file was created/modified, always returns the timestamp from when it was presented on the browser.
Getting EXIF data from images might provide a clue, but the image creation/edits often do not correlate with the text...
If anyone knows how to extract such date info, it'd be helpful
I hope this is a trend that can be reversed.
Worse still, I’ve encountered sites that automatically update their edit dates to be current as a way to optimize SEO. I’ve found articles with decades old information claiming to have been written mere hours or days prior.
Annoying, for sure, but this is the reality of software and technology as the landscape continues to evolve over time.
It seems to me that its become standard practice on marketing type blogs for corporate websites to remove the date from their posts. I think its because (from personal experience) the company will go though a burst of "blog productivity" create a load of content but then not touch it for years, they don't want that content to look out of date or their website to look stagnant.
Removing the date from their posts, or any other content, hides how old it is and therefore obscures how active they are at crating new content.
Most companies try to use their blogs to attract new customers, a new customer may visit their website once or twice and will never see the blog again, it's not important that they do. They don't want it to look stale.
As a counter example, an interesting thread from yesterday [0] was about how CloudFlare use their blog not as a marketing tool but for technical content and attracting employees. They very regulally use their blog, and so keep the date on it showing how fresh it is.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070422