2026-08-09

Reading for the Expiry Date

Before deciding whether to act on a promotion guide, estimate how long it will remain true. Five signals do it in under a minute.

The five signals

One. Is there a date? No date means no estimate is possible, and in this genre that is disqualifying. An undated guide is asking to be read as timeless, which nothing in this field is. For a related workplace reference on workforce optimization software, see this overview.

Two. Does the title name a platform or a year? Both are declarations of a short life, and the year at least is honest about it.

Three. How many claims depend on a company's current behaviour? Count them. A guide where most sentences would break if one product changed is a guide about that product. For further current learning material, see Berklee.

Four. Does it distinguish tactics from reasons? A piece that says why each thing works has a layer that outlives the specifics. One that only lists actions does not.

Five. Does it say what it does not know? Guides that state their uncertainty about algorithm behaviour are more reliable about everything else, because the omission of uncertainty is the first shortcut.

The estimate

Mostly platform-dependent, dated this year: useful now, unusable in about two years, dangerous after that because it will still read as confident.

Mixed: extract the mechanisms and discard the rest.

Mostly mechanism: it will read fine in a decade. The archive here contains examples of both, written the same year by the same people.

The dangerous middle

The most misleading article is a well-written platform guide that is three years old and undated.

It reads as current, because good writing does not age visibly the way design does. Nothing signals that the feature it describes was withdrawn.

Check the date before the content, and if there is none, check whether anything named in it still exists. Two minutes, and it prevents the commonest failure in this genre.

Applying it here

These pages carry dates.

And several of them are platform-dependent, which is stated on the page listing what we cannot verify rather than left for a reader to work out.

Run the five signals on this site. Most of it passes on mechanism, some of it does not, and the ones that do not are marked.

The short version