alt Hacker NewsI don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.
> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
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A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.
Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.
> reading to books > 10 years old
I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.
It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.