This morning, I stumbled across an interesting Twitter thread on the half-life of content on the internet – how long it takes something to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement:

• Twitter: 20 mins
• Facebook: 5 hrs
• Instagram: 20 hrs
• LinkedIn: 24 hrs
• YouTube: 20 days
• Pinterest: 4 mos
• Blog post: 2 yrs

I am, admittedly, a bit of a dinosaur. While I’m just slightly too old to be a Millennial, I’ve been online for thirty years, dating all the way back to when that meant dialing in to BBS’s at a walloping 2400 bits per second and risking the wrath of my parents for tying up the phone line. Similarly, I’ve been blogging for 23 years (!!!), 18 of which right here on this site.

So, while I was an early adopter of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, my posting on all three (and a slew of others along the way – MySpace, Friendster, Path, we hardly knew ye) has been spotty at best.

As a content consumer, I actually truly love Twitter; it’s a firehose of interesting links and takes and ideas from people I think are particularly smart. (Even if the signal-to-noise ratio sometimes leaves a bit to be desired.)

But, as a content creator, I just have trouble with the ephemeral nature of that site and the others. Perhaps, as the philosopher Ernest Becker would have it, that’s because my writing is simply a subconscious raging against my own mortality, a drive to deny my eventual death by struggling to create a legacy (even if just of words) that persists beyond me. More prosaically, perhaps it’s a consequence of my painfully slow writing speed, and the disappointment of my posts disappearing in even less time than it took for me to draft them in the first place. Or, perhaps, it’s because I’m far too long-winded to cram my thoughts into the saner word counts that most social media sites’ designs encourage.

Still, whatever the reason, and even after some relatively long hiatuses, I inevitably find myself winding my way back here, to longer-form blog posting. Sure, a lot of my posts are garbage. But it’s nice to think they’re at least garbage that people can find, and slog their way through, years – or, apparently, decades – down the line.