Has anyone considered the longevity of the content we create here? It occurred to me that the output from our hobby of creating these strange worlds inhabited by fairly pliable people might outlast us all. Or, is my imagination running away with me and these stories will disappear into the ether in the cyber equivalent of a landfill site?
Behold the example of SuperStories.net. It's an ancient url - and if you go back to the Internet Archive, you can pull up pages going back to long, long ago - but it's a site that has been broken and rebuilt many times, and there are massive gaps in the Internet Archive of the site. Some of those pornographer's stories are accessible, but far from all. Maybe far from most. In a decade or two, that could be CHYOA. Some stories survive by proliferation. There are threads on the old ADDventure site which have been backed up elsewhere, and stories on CHYOA which are backed up there, and sometimes somebody will take a couple of chapters and put them up on Hentai Foundry or something...but a lot of the early internet porn sites are gone. Lost. Forgotten to time. Faps in the wind. So yes, maybe in a hundred years somebody will still be fapping to what is written here. Or maybe a digital archaeologist will dig up a forgotten archive. More likely...things will break down. Digital formats change. Laws change. Content that was once acceptable might not be, backups get corrupted, shit happens. So...enjoy CHYOA while it lasts. It won't be forever.
I think we will reach a point where the real deal will be finding things. We will be (we already kind of are) swarmed with so much content that it will be actually difficult to get what you want out of the internet. The last few years we have started pumping digital trash into it (pictures of your dog, rant about your favorite show being cancelled, influencers daily routines...) to an alarming rate. I already find search engines to be an awful lot less useful than ten years ago. I can only imagine what will happen in another ten years or twenty. Probably stories will survive, for a while at least. Nobody will ever read them again though, because nobody will ever be able to reach them, buried among thousands of thousands of similar contents. Not even the sharpest tagging could prevent that. And I daresay most usere aren't very sharp in their tagging...
The archeologists of the future will have the exact opposite problem as the archeologist from our time. The job used to be about creating a view of a long gone world based on some minimalistic object... and make up theory about the hunting habits of Neanderthalers based on a single arrowhead. In the future, you'll have to wade through enormous piles of useless junk archived on gigantic hard drives to catch the essence of our world.
