It Was True When I Wrote It

A recommendation doesn’t stay the way it was written. The words on the page do, but the thing they describe keeps moving.

Say someone writes an honest post about a tool they use every day. They mention what it costs, what it does well and the one thing about it that drives them mad. Every line is accurate. Two years later the price has gone up, the annoying thing has been fixed, and a feature they praised has quietly moved to a more expensive plan. The post still says exactly what it said on the day it went up.

Nobody lied. But a reader who lands on that post from a search this morning doesn’t know it’s two years old, or doesn’t think to check, and acts on it as if it were written yesterday. If what’s on the other side of the link doesn’t match, they won’t blame the company. They’ll remember who told them.

This is the part of content that compounds in the wrong direction. A post that keeps bringing people in is doing its job, and the longer it does it, the more people meet whatever in it has gone stale. So the posts most worth watching are the good ones, because they’re the ones still being read.

The fix is ordinary maintenance, and most of it comes down to putting it on the calendar. Once or twice a year, go back through anything that recommends something. Open each link and see where it actually lands. Check the price against what the post says. Then ask whether you’d still say the same thing if you were writing it today, and if you wouldn’t, change it.

When something has changed, say so on the page. A short note near the top is enough: “Updated in March. The price has gone up since this was first written, and the free plan no longer includes exports.” It takes a minute to write and tells the reader someone is still paying attention. Quietly rewriting the old version as though it had always said the new thing doesn’t.

Sometimes the honest update is that you wouldn’t recommend it anymore. That’s an uncomfortable edit when the post still earns something, and it’s tempting to leave it, since it isn’t wrong exactly, only old. The trouble is that a reader can’t tell old from wrong. Take the link out, say why, and point them to what you’d use instead if there’s something worth pointing to. The commission from that post goes. What you keep is a reader who’s learned you’ll tell them when you’ve changed your mind, and that kind of trust is slow on purpose.

Going back through old posts is also one of the few chances you get to look at your own judgement over a long stretch. Some recommendations hold up well and some look a bit naive now. Better to know which before the next one gets written.

The post was true when it went up. Keeping it that way is easy to forget, because nothing reminds you. It just sits there, being read.