Should you update your older posts?

tldr: I build a corpus of knowledge, opinions and guides meant to live for years, so freezing posts would kill it – updates get logged reddit-style between original date and update date, backdating tells honestly when writing started, old posts link forward and get enriched, mind-changes carry rationale, and predictions get additive corrections, not scumbag silent rewrites.

I build a corpus, not news

I was thinking what should I do about this… then it’s complicated.

What feels dishonest? What? One day you have here one text, next day another. And yet, what we usually accuse the news of, how we retrofit events to fit the narrative, in my case it is maybe different.

For news agencies it is very simple. When you published it, you have like 1 hour to fix. Don’t touch it anymore, else you lose your integrity.

In my case, it is different because I’m not trying to be the news or events blogger. I am, as a philosopher, trying to create a corpus. Corpus of knowledge, opinions, guides to carry out through years onwards. My intention is one stumbles into one of my articles and continues reading the rest and many.

I think everyone should have the luxury to update their previous posts. Even if you don’t do the discipline and honesty. Consider how many readers would stumble upon it out of time, out of place, without knowing what you had in mind at that time. At all. Generally nobody thinks about it. We gonna value the ideas that transcend time. I would value your opinions on specific events, not your recollection on that.

I need to maybe make more points about my blog, that it is both documenting the sins and fall of humanity, and the vehicle to convince you to care about your freedom. I know realistically that I will not be able to change anything, yet I’m doing both for future generations and for anyone to stumble upon, and for somebody to read when I posted somewhere last week.

How I update without lying

Yet this could backfire when somebody returns a year later and sees it changed. But at the same time I want to constantly, well maybe not constantly but enrich when opportunity arises.

Typically, when an article connects to a specific time and era still, like what was actual this particular month, and then a month later, it changed. New facts arise. And my claims if read now would be inaccurate. And I would make a fool of myself. Because I was not living in future, haha.

This is when I would love to go and update. And yet I have to be honest.

So I found the best way is to keep the original date and keep the update date and honestly notify all of my updates at the bottom, reddit style. Sometimes I might even, if some article mutates enough, update the front matter to notify what many of the claims are not true, go read where updates were changed.

Somebody suggested to do the strikethrough for corrections, but that suffers from the inability to transfer well between mediums. If anyone copies my post, that formatting might not be preserved. So I think it would be better to add an additive one. My corrections I try to do at the bottom with updates, like a corrections box, but additive – your old text stays as it was, the update at the bottom explains.

Also, I was thinking what I should do with the versions, but I found it very inconvenient. I keep versions 1, 2, 3 for readers to switch back, but I found that story, oh no, kinda crazy.

Then I had a problem that time flies and the list of stuff I want to write about was growing and growing indefinitely. And yet, sometimes I have written already 90% of it, but it was not published eventually, not worked, not completed, and yet it ties to a specific time anyway. Here I straight up place the creation date of when I actually started writing about it. Even if it is 5 months away or something. And then, if it is something neutral, which is not concerned with specific events, then I just keep it at this. After all, if I had energy, I would have published at that time already. But I didn’t, because I have 200 articles floating around that I want to write, and yet I can’t, I barely can produce a couple of them a week.

So, to be honest, you might see many that I had a draft at that time of event, but could not produce that time, and then I returned it months later to publish as if from that date, and then potentially place updates, what I retrofitted now to get it back into the current events if applicable. Honest? Dishonest? I don’t know, nor should I care. Cause my goal is to create a corpus. And in an ideal world I would be able to write about everything as it comes, but I can’t. It could be months after a small event or something mundane that I have energy or interest to write about it, and yet it’s too late. So should I just abandon it? Of course not.

For a reader who may read chronologically or stumble upon it later, years away, remember that event and understand how I was writing about it then. That’s kinda valuable in a sense. Much better than just skipping it entirely.

And yet I try to do…I try to be honest here. If I write at the time of event, I write as it is. But then sometimes I find something years later, like… today I learned something that surprised me, but relevant. After all, what the hell should I do? I was not aware of many events even now, when I’m not monitoring one field at all. Something happened even before I was born, and yet I have an opinion on that.

Linking, enriching and rewriting

And then I face the problem of improvement. As my corpus of works grows, I want to interlink them. And how do I interlink the post from the past towards the post in the future? I have a dilemma here and still it is unresolved. How do I properly approach that? Ideally, that should not be an issue. Just do that. Link the old post with the new post if they explain the concept or something much better. And yet, it also feels dishonest to me that from the old you suddenly jump into better explanation or something.

And I know that if I deny myself the ability to edit all posts, I would rob myself of being able to link back. Imagine if I have a thousand of them. Before it was very tedious work, but now it can be all done automatically. I could just go through my library and find thoughts related to what I’m currently writing and just link it back. Old bloggers did not have that privilege of being able to connect, and this is exactly in the spirit of the old internet.

And then the issue of just enriching the articles. What if I want to add images between sections later for my best works? Because in future it’s gonna be increasingly automated and already is. One day I may wake up and decide I want micro-images between my sections and just populate all my previous works with illustrations or interactive HTML graphics. After all, I do consider most of them valuable both now and to read in future, so why would I not do that?

What to do when I had work and I knew that at the time I was not able to complete it, in addition because it would take too much time or space, or when I’m already months away and I just can’t. How do I manage that? I don’t know really. I already have an example when a big article was written without the new data that was available. And yet some got outdated. So I guess I would just do a full rewrite and name it 2.0, for example.

One pattern I also found useful: if one of my articles is too different to edit, I would rather create a new one and link to it, and say that the previous time I was erroneously thinking, or was thinking different – and then show how it is, what changed. That logic of how it changed is also important. Or it could be not an error at all, just stale, whereas conditions could be changing completely different.

Changing my mind and the prediction trap

What about honest or dishonest when I correct myself and explain why? Because even if I change my mind later I really need rationale. Because I’m here trying most of the time to explain the rationale of why and that. Even if it’s very simple, like liberty is most important and that’s it. And yet, if I change my mind, that again changes and refines the level of thinking that led to it. It is material in itself. We don’t just record the paths that I say so. We record the paths that I said so. And yet we found a better way later.

One might accuse me that doing so might contradict the idea I preach, that some ideas are forever and never to be broken. And yet, at the same time, it shares with similar ideas that many ideas should be acceptable at the same time. Even if I have the same idea old and new, and new is a bit different.

This is a trap however, what many would face if they start making predictions. And if you make predictions in hindsight, that could be very sus. You may pull an influence on a reader that you are actually smart, when in fact you are not.

What’s gonna haunt me if one time I’m right or wrong? Or if I start to be right too much…

The archive becomes a duty

This is where I admit the scale problem. I already have a lot of posts, and I want to add more still, and I drown in my inability to write about everything I want. The list grows faster than I do. That is the normal state, not an excuse.

And yet I want every article, when it is stumbled upon, to serve very well by itself, without reading anything else. When somebody picks just one from the many, it is still valuable. One post, one serving. And when I think an article is incomplete, that gives me a duty: go back, correct, update, expand with new thoughts.

So the archive slowly turns from a pile of ambitions into a duty. Not everything can get the care. The ones that earned readers get the corrections, the rest can rot honestly – their dates already telling why. But expansion of the incomplete ones comes first, because one stumble is all a post will ever get. Most readers never scroll deeper. For them, every good single post is the whole corpus.