Something that
we're advised we should do.
Node for
posterity. Node so that when someone reads this stuff in 50 years time, they'll be
interested.
Now, in theory, this means we should be noding fact, noding informed opinion, even the daylogs probably count as a best guess at what'll still be of interest that far into the future.
This leaves a lot of other stuff. Like the uninformed opinion nodes. The getting to know you nodes. The endless feminism, racism, gun control, politically correct populist nodes, political nodes. These make up a great amount of the new writeups that fill the board every time we refresh a browser.
A couple of things to consider.
With any luck, all these things will be so hopelessly out of date by then that the puerile wrangling that goes on will seem like the lost transcripts of a bunch of kids arguing about whether abolishing slavery is a good thing or not, and about as interesting as reading the list of who begat who, who was begotten by someone else in the Old Testament of the Bible, i.e., not at all.
Look at the evolution of the internet over the last ten years. Progress has been rapid, and more importantly, it's been exponential. No-one reads old threads on BBSs anymore because they're not exciting enough for us.
Even USENET news is being dropped by many ISPs as no longer capable of holding the public interest. Do we honestly think that writeups on Everything2 will not go the same way? Do we really think that in 50 years anyone will give a damn about what we write?
I approve of noding for posterity. I think it's of benefit to the signal to noise ratio, but let's be honest with ourselves, okay? The only people who are remotely interested in what we write are us.
Roninspoon: Fair enough, but we're not actually writing for anthropologists, are we? I thought we were writing as if E2 would even still exist that far ahead - which personally, i don't believe for a second - and therefore for people like us.