A disturbing large percentage of citations of some of my best work say "Written in 2012 but still relevant", which a) is a direct artifact of the blogging form factor, b) is an unforced error, and c) I should just fix forever when I achieve activation energy.
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Or, date your work but add a "Last reviewed: .." date that you update every 2-3 years?
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That seems strictly worse for everyone. It commits the writer to doing additional maintenance on their back-catalogue (or automates lying, which we should avoid), it continues to tell marginal readers "Yep, this is old and dusty; move on", etc.
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Do you mean “don’t put a date on your work” or “create work that doesn’t age”? If the latter, do you have practical advice? Feels like it would preclude people from writing timely pieces.
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I mean both of those things, for most writers. Most people shouldn't write pieces which depreciate. Timeliness is overrated if your publication doesn't structurally *have* to publish on a defined cadence. The NYT can throw out great writing daily. Most writers shouldn't.
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hard disagree, every pice of info or advice has a freshness relevance to the time it was made and the context of that world. no date no read is my policy.
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That seems incredibly reader unfriendly. Context always matters and time is an awfully important element of that context. Most writing will have an implied date (eg mention Yahoo! as a tech company), better to be explicit.
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Find this a really frustrating thing as a reader. It's not that old content is necessarily unreliable, but knowing when it was written provides context around what else was being said by others at that time and what factors may or may not have been taken into consideration.
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As a reader, I do hate it when sites don't mention a publication date anywhere. There's a lot of content out there that does age.
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My interpretation of this behavior is the human mind defaults to prioritizing gossip. Where by gossip I mean the latest twists and turns of status games. If true, then the qualifier it's old-but-still-good is a compliment. Signaling unusual writing, which has lasting value.
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When I built the FSN site, I specifically avoided dated slugs and went with the simplest slug possible so people wouldn’t say, “Oh, that’s from 2016? Pfffft.
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I also try to write evergreen articles that will require no or very little updating over the next several years.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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