An evergreen story is any story where the difference
between the submission date of the story and the
publication date of the story is two years or more.
These stories need not necessarily be any more interesting than your average high-ranked ones on the front page.
Plenty of important stories go unnoticed, if they aren't picked up and submitted instantly after their inception, to various news outlets, with even bigger subscriber bases than HN.
Once a story is no longer fresh, it is highly rare that it retains its relevance, reader-interest or uniqueness.
If a story, despite not attracting much attention in it's 'first release', is periodically submitted by various people at various times, then it indicates timelessness.
However the fact that some very worthy stories get lost and never really see traction or virality, is in itself cause for constant fine-tuning of the way stories get weighted, ranked and thrust onto the first page(s) of not just HN, but just about every other similar news board out there.
Personally, I'd like to see a 'second chance' ticker that continuously scrolls the most feverishly upvoted AND downvoted non-front page, stories of the hour, occupying a sliver of real estate at the top of the page.
Whether on HN or Twitter or on the most trafficked general-interest blog out there, recycling older content should not be frowned upon.
A content recycling and re-purposing program should be part of a comprehensive publishing plan for any digital outlet that rapidly generates content.
It is the responsible thing to do.
Stellar content is missed by readers for a whole host of reasons. This happens even when that content is widely shared by friends or coworkers.
This brings us to the deconstruction of what stellar content really is.
Information ( and thus content ) is judged by not just the truth value or the interesting-ness of the insights therein, but also
* the timeliness of those insights and more importantly
* the perspective a fresh ( and a keen ) pair of eyes brings
to those very same insights
It is interesting to observe how in an age of countless distribution channels and dissemination models, a thoroughly flat world for information access of all kinds with very few old-world gatekeepers and in an age of roaring democratization of most content[1], we cannot escape the tyranny of the hive mind and groupthink. If anything, it seems to have gained fresh legs.
I don't know if this recycling, second-chancing and re-purposing of content is the perfect antidote to hive mind and groupthink, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.
[1] I say most content because if you are not an English speaker or if your content is exclusively in Saami (of the Uralic language family) or in any of the hundreds of languages with few bi-lingual speakers in those languages, your content and the profound insights contained therein - gleaned from the tradition of oral histories passed down from generation to generation - is mostly lost, at least for now. In that sense, the digital divide is still very much here.
Ryan Singel here from Contextly (my co-founder wrote the blog post).
I think you are absolutely right on with the insight that stellar content is missed by readers for many reasons.
We are part of a solution for publishers that want to have a re-purposing program. Some of that can and should be very editorial, but it can also be complemented or informed by a service like ours that works on a publisher's own domain.
Our definition of "evergreen" for the purposes of the study of the HN archive differs from the one we use for our publishing clients.
That said, I do think it would be interesting to see what stories continually get re-submitted, as that may well show off the most unchanging evergreen.
(Defined in that case as a story that continually has a fairly high value for a substantial number of people over a steady amount of time. Compare that to say David Sedari's SantaLand Diaries, which is also an "evergreen," but I would strongly suspect a highly seasonal time of interest.)
"Evergreen" is a misnomer for this.
These stories need not necessarily be any more interesting than your average high-ranked ones on the front page.Plenty of important stories go unnoticed, if they aren't picked up and submitted instantly after their inception, to various news outlets, with even bigger subscriber bases than HN.
Once a story is no longer fresh, it is highly rare that it retains its relevance, reader-interest or uniqueness.
If a story, despite not attracting much attention in it's 'first release', is periodically submitted by various people at various times, then it indicates timelessness.
However the fact that some very worthy stories get lost and never really see traction or virality, is in itself cause for constant fine-tuning of the way stories get weighted, ranked and thrust onto the first page(s) of not just HN, but just about every other similar news board out there.
Personally, I'd like to see a 'second chance' ticker that continuously scrolls the most feverishly upvoted AND downvoted non-front page, stories of the hour, occupying a sliver of real estate at the top of the page.
Whether on HN or Twitter or on the most trafficked general-interest blog out there, recycling older content should not be frowned upon.
A content recycling and re-purposing program should be part of a comprehensive publishing plan for any digital outlet that rapidly generates content.
It is the responsible thing to do.
Stellar content is missed by readers for a whole host of reasons. This happens even when that content is widely shared by friends or coworkers.
This brings us to the deconstruction of what stellar content really is.
Information ( and thus content ) is judged by not just the truth value or the interesting-ness of the insights therein, but also
It is interesting to observe how in an age of countless distribution channels and dissemination models, a thoroughly flat world for information access of all kinds with very few old-world gatekeepers and in an age of roaring democratization of most content[1], we cannot escape the tyranny of the hive mind and groupthink. If anything, it seems to have gained fresh legs.I don't know if this recycling, second-chancing and re-purposing of content is the perfect antidote to hive mind and groupthink, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.
[1] I say most content because if you are not an English speaker or if your content is exclusively in Saami (of the Uralic language family) or in any of the hundreds of languages with few bi-lingual speakers in those languages, your content and the profound insights contained therein - gleaned from the tradition of oral histories passed down from generation to generation - is mostly lost, at least for now. In that sense, the digital divide is still very much here.