What I found about the age stats of top posts on different reddit style sites around the internet. I also looked at a few reddit subs because those are meant to be destinations in and of themselves.

Here is the raw data:

Reddit/r/all:
4h 4h 4h 5h 3h
Reddit alternatives:
1d 1d 6h 1d 1d (feels slow)
/r/funny:
6h 24d 7h 31m 3d (wow, a month old item is 2nd on the page.  It better be really funny.)
/r/AskReddit
15h 8h 1m 6d 11h
/r/gaming
5h 1mo 17h 1m 6d
/r/worldnews
9h 26d 11h 9m 5d (besides 9m that's really slow)
r/todayilearned
9d 4h 7h 13m 8d
Scored.co (mostly default subs):
5h 9h 4h 4h 9h
Scored.co/c/all:
2h 5h 5h 8h 4h
patriots.win:
2h 5h 2h 4h 4h
Consume Product:
9h 4h 3h 2h 7h
Saidit.net/s/all:
2h 15h 58m 5h 15h
voat.xyz/all:
7h 6h 5h 7h 7h
lemmy.world:
21h 11h 1d 2d 21h (much slower than most places, but it has comment activity to make up for it)
hive.blog:
4h 17h 1d 11h 10h
rdrama․net:
20m 2h 4m 1h 2h (very fast.  The site and the post age combined feels sperg.)
tildes:
1d 1d 1d 4d 17h (This is what a dead site feels like)
poal:
6h 4h 9h 4h 2h
raddle/featured(default):
1h 9h 5h 6h 7h
raddle/all:
21h 14m 1h 4h 2h
trustcafe:
47m 48m 2h 2h 2h (I think it's just new sort)
goatmatrix.net:
3h 1h 9h 5h 23h

To me it looks like a consistent pattern between pages that felt slow vs not slow is making sure one of your top 5 posts is within 5 hours. Of course some of these 5 hour listings may be 5.8 hours. It all depends on how the site stringifies durations.

It looks like goatmatrix is within a healthy age distribution. Most of those posts at the top were post whenevers. 4 out of 5 actually.

I looked at the whenever queue to see if we had a recent post in there under the hypothetical if that it would be a new regular post otherwise. The answer is yes. Minutes ago. It looks like @LibertyIsTheLaw is going absolutely crazy in there. Very cool. Which really shows the value of post whenever. The amount of content he added would have otherwise been a forum slide, (not that he would have done that if post whenever didn't exist). So we converted a forum slide into a bank of content. That's the dream guys.

I may slow the whenever rate by a hair because if anything we are ahead of the average for the most popular sites, and slowing it a titch will improve comment and vote health. And it will help post now posts compete a little.

I'd say this was a success. We hit the front page health goal. We absorbed good content from people interested in providing a lot of content. Post whenever feels sluggish but as I mentioned in a comment there are fundamental mathematical reasons why it will feel that way if it is doing what it should.

I just want to say to all of the doubters that fought me on making this feature who didn't see the point, have a little faith. I have a direction to what I'm doing. If I'm trying to make a push for something there is a reason. It's all a part of a calculated plan. The faster I can get people on board with something I'm pushing for the faster I can progress through the stages of what I'm trying to do and the faster I can make it good.

The site now has consistent front page health and I can market the shit out of it and get more users. I can make it more consistent and more healthy by making it dynamic so we just barely hit that age target and hit stronger the vote and comment health. This means that for every visitor who hits the site our conversion will be higher and our retention will be higher. User base in the long run = exposure*conversion*retention. We just improved all of them because now I am way more motivated to go and promote this site.

Post whenever is the decisive straw that converted this site from inviable to viable. It's an extremely high power pawn move. I can develop this site faster if I have users who can trust my pawn moves.