alt Hacker NewsModern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever.
But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past.
The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.
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> Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old.
Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast.
If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.
On the other hand, old courses with outdated info are a major frustration on the platform and I can see why the Udemy might be downranking them.
The person at the root of this comment thread might not like it but they can’t just sit back and collect revenue forever without putting out updates.
> but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?"
I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining.
My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described.
It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.
Some owed in tech like relearning the same lessons over and over with new instead of realizing there’s a lot that is transferable and new technologies world be better implemented, sooner if it understood what had been done to date.
Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead.
The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category.
Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate.
> If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard
Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.