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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

There’s a popular concept in the content industry of “evergreen content”, meaning posts that are always relevant or useful regardless of when they were originally posted. The idea is that articles will have a longer “shelf life” if they are not tied to a particular date or recent event.

Of course, producing true evergreen content takes more effort than just removing the publish date but that’s one easy way to fake it.

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Originally posted: <date>

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.

I see that a lot these days with "most recent update" that I'm pretty sure is a lie. Or maybe they changed some tiny thing to make it not a technical lie.

Marketing is all about lying. Making up fake reviews, customer testimonials.

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.

Movie with CGI such as Star Wars = lying?

Fiction is lies only when you want to pass them off as the truth:

"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

There's in the same dialog this warning about advertising and politics:

“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.”

need a revisit, that seems appropriate and deep

It is! Ende was raised under the esoteric Anthroposophy philosophy, and I suspect much of his works are dedicated to debunk its nonsensical beliefs. The second half of The Neverending Story is a philosophical treaty on itself (it hurts the book as an action story, but gives you a lot to ponder about).

His child books certainly have a deep second reading as adults.

All fiction is a lie, by its very definition.

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.

I would argue that a lie involves deliberate deception, not just untruth. Fiction, then, is not a lie, as by definition it is something imagined or invented, and therefore not created to deceive.

I think deceive was created to explain the difference in intent.

Yep, the whole thing is made up!

people in the “content industry” (tell me that’s not a real thing)

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.

It’s too general though isn’t it. It would be like the “doing stuff” industry being a thing. There might be people who use the term, but that doesn’t mean the term points to any actual phenomenon in the real world.

It's a huge industry. There are services to buy writers, buy content, trade content, link content, guest post so on and so forth.

That was my reaction, it’s scary right. Like need an article on safely installing a light switch? Call the content industry. Managing stored PII and passwords? Content industry. Medical information? Content industry.

I see some articles which always have a "last updated" of today. You can refresh a day later and watch it change.

A past employer almost went with this approach, but with a technical audience it's hard to cover all the edge cases with RSS. People get cranky when they get pinged when an article updates superficially, but you also want people updated when the article is basically completely rewritten

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

I don't see how this is a problem with RSS. RSS (and the other feed formats) have a concept of an entry ID. If user's don't want to see updates they only show items with a new entry ID.

To get even more nuanced generally a superficial update shouldn't change the "updated" time, this gives another level of control.

and then someone figures out how to put a `<?php echo date('l, F jS, Y'); ?>` into the "Most recent update:" line ... voila! Perennially up-to-date!

I first heard about "evergreen content" from the local news industry. To add examples of what it looks like (to demonstrate the extra effort required as you mentioned), here are a couple recent examples from The Guardian (because there's no paywall):

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).

The ultimate piece of evergreen content I’ve heard of is Peter Stark’s “Frozen Alive” for Outside Magazine.[0] It’s a story about what hypothermia does to you, told as a second person narrative. It was first written 25 years ago. It was a hit article in 1997, and since at least 2016, it is one of Outside Magazine’s most read articles every year.[1][2]

[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...

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