The Fierce Idiocy of "New" (opens in new tab)

The entire race is heading in the wrong direction, I feel. The best sites I've ever visited were ones where I got linked to an article or essay and found myself stuck on the site for an entire day, reading multiple years worth of archives. Sites like paulgraham.com, joelonsoftware.com, actsofgord.com, and the now-defunct myboot.com are still etched in my mind, even if I originally read them 5+ years. Hell, I kept coming back to myboot.com for 9 years; he never did post chapter 24 of She Hates My Futon GODDAMNIT!!!

People are always into new stuff because there's a chance something new might be good. When something's "old" and you haven't heard about it, odds are it's because it isn't any good.

So people are deciding that the odds that something unknown could turn out to be good are better than the odds that something known could turn out to have been misjudged by their network of contacts and info sources.

The reason that short, frequent publishing is so pervasive on the web is that you have to compete with everything else on the internet that is shiny, flashing, and begging for your attention. I think that we, as humans, have a predilection to focus on real-time updates, on what's happening NOW. It is the only reason that I can possibly understand the success of things like Twitter or Facebook status updates.

Furthermore, there are so many benefits to publishing frequently that it's hard to argue against it. For instance, if you publish frequently, you will have a better Google ranking, be seen as an "active" member of the community, get more links on social news sites that link submissions to URLs, constantly show up in peoples' RSS readers, etc. Also, if you write a long, substantive article, many people will not take the time to read it. Most will just skim to see if there's anything interesting, and if they don't find anything, they will leave.

Also, if you want to make money on the Internet, it's something that you need to do daily, or at least very regularly. Dollars follows peoples' eyeballs, and peoples' eyeballs follow constantly updated content. I can't think of an example off the top of my head of a blogger, videoblogger, etc. making a living by posting infrequent posts but I can list a couple dozen people that make very good money with either gawker-like blogs on certain topics, a regularly updated promotional (video)blog, or through advertising dollars on popular YouTube channels.

I know in my rational mind that it is probably better to read content-rich articles on the web, but my reptilian mind is constantly drawn to the new, the hot, the now. Until somebody finds a solution, there will always be a short battle with myself every time I fire up Google reader or think of checking HN.

Funny I should see this now, as I just came to Hacker News to submit my own, tangentially related essay, "Blogging and seeking out what should be remembered": http://jseliger.com/2009/06/14/blogging-and-seeking . Book/lit blogs seem to have a somewhat more balanced repertoire than the noisy sites shouting "new! new! new!," but they're hardly immune from crowd-following.

I think the problem is partly a coordination problem. I want to read what everyone else is reading, so that we can talk about it together. I could read War And Peace, but I would have no-one to talk about it with. But I know everyone else is reading what's new.

There are other ways to coordinate, though. Book clubs, for example, often pick non-new books to read. Maybe solutions should concentrate on the coordination problem. I could imagine a version of Hacker News that bans all material published in the last month, so that it is only for timeless classics.

(I am not claiming that coordination is the only cause of this phenomenon.)

New is extremely important in art. If people weren't willing to give something a shot because it's the new, it would be impossible for debut art to get a foothold, and as a result the old stuff wouldn't be as good because we wouldn't recognize and reward new artists.

Processing new releases into our culture is the way that we form that culture in the first place and make progress.

If we don't keep an eye out for new voices, we'll be stuck with the old ones forever. It's really hard to break through as a new arrival, why would you want to make it even harder?

I just received an old used book in the morning mail, Dijkstra's A Discipline of Programming. I've bought other classics. Some are available online, a.o. here:

http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=SERIES11430&type=series...

Great thinking is not new.

And now there's a lot of hype centered around real-time [1][2] so expect this to continue even if in many cases it's a bit ridiculous.

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/ron-conway-to-focus-ang...

[2] twitter.com

The focus on "New!" Isn't all bad. It can mean something innocuous like "Here's something you probably haven't seen before..."

Of course, this is bound to degenerate into behaviour of hunting for scoops, in a hope to discover a new trend before it gets popular...