this story is based on a viral screenshot of a single question on Stack Exchange that had two replies and seemed to have been a joke but huhpic.twitter.com/948a9q9DSq
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Last week, a year-old http://change.org petition made the rounds, and a bunch of sites wrote it up in some weird perpetual motion machine. As best I can tell, absolutely none of them talked to the organizers, or explained why a year-old petition was in the news.pic.twitter.com/XZ4eEbAo02
![[August]](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1194421331942494208/6UrJL2ip_normal.jpg)
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I guess what i am saying is that we seem to be returning to a moment in time where "it's on the internet let's make it a headline on our site!" is apparently a viable content strategy, despite literally everything we have learned about why that's a very bad idea.
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Anyway, this is a bad idea for lots and lots of reasons! It's a waste of time, for the people creating the files and the people reading them. What value are you adding here? The minimal search traffic they bring in is a losing gamehttps://twitter.com/mccanner/status/1155840562286780417 …
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And to make one point very clear: I will die on the "this cool thing on the internet is worth our time!" hill. It IS often worth our time! It's what I do for a living! But man, you gotta be smart about it. Churn without context is not smart.
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There are two ways to have handled this petition: 1) a file that says a year-old petition has XX signers + a wiki history of halloween, which is what nearly every site did. or 2) explain WHY you're suddenly seeing a year-old petition blanket your feed.https://twitter.com/mccanner/status/1155839926514196480 …
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which one do you think actually helps readers more?
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End of conversation
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It surfaced on a few local news Facebook pages and then quickly began growing signatories from 15k - 30k then -60k in 24 hours. I’d argue worth covering for the viral element. Unlike a randomly viral old photo this thing was moving fast. We reached out to organizers but no dice.
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definitely agree on the worth covering for the viral element part. But why not say that to readers? "The petition is a year-old" (which you did) "but gained new steam this week after x, y, z."
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