My very first node (in the E2 vernacular being an original title with the first post in it) still exists.
Written well over 20 years ago, it is short, sweet, somewhat informative, sort of cheeky and quite heavily linked, as was the habit of many of us back then. There's nothing quite special about it: it doesn't go into great detail, nor does it really add much to anything really, apart from establishing then that I had an interest in comic books and pinball games. I'm still not sure what else it meant to say, or--if i was rewriting it to post here now-- if I would write it much differently.
Following that node I did most certainly write things that were subsequently removed by the roving site administrators. These were for the most part little snippets of things I'd read that were various attempts of 'Noding for Numbers' which was the first sort of gamification of an online community that I'd been suckered into.
After a while I found how to present my voice here, found things to 'node' and shared enough of myself that I wanted to, supported by a vast array of other writers, readers, artists and misanthropes.
Everything2 is a different creature now than the feverishly frantic frolics of its first few years, and a much different creature than the more structured stoic stern turn it attempted to take after that. The main difference is the audience: E2 is no longer a community, but all the same potential and tools remain. Another main difference is nodes nowadays sometimes become pile-on nodes.
As of this writing, above this post is this node's first writeup. A new user has written about how they want to write here in this space outside 'of other social media platforms'. (An aside: of note today is that Wikipedia has just turned 20. Here's what I wrote when it turned 10) It has a few more 'upvotes' than downvotes (the same as my first node). I wish the author the best of luck. I read just about every new node that comes in, and even if their second, third and umpteenth node turns out to be more rubbish than my first few attempts to write here, they are welcome.