How old should the average content we consume be? I’m not sure this question has a clear answer, but it is something I have been grappling with a lot recently. As both a consumer and a producer of online content this is a topic that touches close to my heart. For example, every article I have written for Voyagers has followed the same pattern of interactions.
The vast majority of views occur early in the essay’s lifespan, followed by a long diminishing tail towards zero. I've found this pattern holds regardless of the quality of what I create, with the only real difference being a shift up or down in the total number of interactions. For certain types of media, like news, this makes sense—reading an article from the 1970s wouldn't be useful beyond its use as a historical artifact. However, I'm more skeptical about this pattern being good for much of the media we consume. I would estimate that, across Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube (my primary sources of entertainment), the average age of the content I consume is less than a month old. On Twitter, in particular, it's rare for me to see a tweet from more than a few hours ago. I simply have a hard time believing that the highest quality material is that recent, yet that's what I spend most of my time-consuming.
Even on websites like Substack, when I go searching for content, it's rare for me to come across anything older than a month or two. To find older content, I have to deliberately scroll through the works of writers I enjoy, but then I lose the benefits of the filtering that recommendation algorithms provide. Media does not have to be delivered this way; consider the library as an example of a format that emphasizes quality rather than timeliness. But even with only recommendation-driven software, the insane degree of modernity is not a prerequisite. Spotify will often recommend music that is over 50 years old, and I think that is awesome!
I fear that a huge amount of the content that has been produced in the last 20 years is locked on platforms that simply will never recommend it. There is a balance that must be struck between the consumption of old and new media. If, for much of Western history, the balance was tilted too far towards the old, I believe, for example, that people in the past read too much Latin literature. Now the balance has gone too far towards the new. Given the way I consume and produce media, I hope that we can find a way to strike a better balance eventually. But for now, I think I should spend more time at the library and less on Twitter.
