2026-08-09

Why Advice Expires

If a headline names a platform, the advice expires when the platform changes. That test takes one second and it sorts most of the genre.

Six things this site recommended died: free page reach, Facebook landing pages, Twitter as a discovery channel, blog outreach at scale, MySpace, and EMI. Every one depended on a company decision rather than on how people behave, and each ended without notice. A related workplace perspective is covered in Monitask’s employee attendance tracking software.

A tactic is a specific action on a specific product; a mechanism is why it worked. Almost all advice is written as the first and almost all the value is in the second. Ask why a tactic worked — if no answer appears, it rests on volume and will fail first and hardest.

Eight article types recur every year with the platform names swapped, and all eight existed in 2010. They recur because the questions recur, because names must be current to be found, and because scheduled publishing needs topics. For current technology context, see TechCrunch.

Five signals estimate an article's expiry before you read it: a date, a platform or year in the title, how many claims depend on a company, whether it explains why things work, and whether it states its uncertainty.

And the same reading applied forwards shows which parts of the 2026 consensus a reader in 2036 will find quaint.