Content Doesn’t Have an Expiration Date

Published on 29 June 2024

Imagine this situation: You scroll through YouTube and find some video from, let’s say, 10 years ago. What you do is probably stop for a second, think, “Dawg, that’s some ancient stuff,”, and scroll by.

Sounds familiar, isn’t it? (If it doesn’t, congrats!)

Yeah, that was me until recently. Nowadays, I don’t give a single shit about the publication date. Art isn’t food; it doesn’t have an expiration date that you should care about! Be it video, drawing, music or a blog post, it doesn’t need to be shot, drawn, composed, or written yesterday to be good. Sometimes it’s actually the opposite; the older something is, the more unlikely it’s made by AI.

Recommendation algorithms will suggest a bunch of fresh and cool stuff, but not the same things made a few years ago, just because it’s dated. There are, of course, things that need to be up-to-date, like tutorials for professional software. Most things, however, don’t.

Don’t get me started on tick-tock or whatever it’s called, that shit is 100 times worse.

Deep breath, Why am I writing all this? Well, the answer is because I’m a silly goober who wanted to blog about it. More seriously, though, it’s because this has been bothering me lately. I absolutely hate how the modern web normalized “fast food” content. So much content that took tons of effort to create is consumed once and then… forever forgotten.

I’m so grateful that I’ve discovered the “smol web” and personal blogs. It’s a whole different, better world that made me appreciate human creations. Oh, and honorable mention to the weirdest place on the World Wild Web: the Fediverse (Seriously, it can be so cool and weird at the same time) that doesn’t have recommendation algorithms!