Is longer really better?

What if we are really just hanging out to wipe our arse and get on with it?

While watching some of the Rio Olympics running coverage, I came to the conclusion that the 100m sprints were more exciting than the marathon. And that my favourite length of running race was the 1500m – long enough to really get into and become attached to a favourite, but still short enough to watch the whole thing without needing to fast forward or leave the room to take a dump.

Steemit posts are a bit like that too, I think. Ones where people just post a picture and a link to another site are probably more like a false start than an actual 100m race. A real 100m post might have one paragraph and a couple of pictures. But surprisingly, a lot of people on Steemit seem to aspire to the marathon end of posting.

Yesterday I started reading a post where the author actually said “I spent 21 hours writing this post”. I spent about 21 minutes reading it, but then my arse went numb (I was sitting on the toilet) so I only ended up reading half of it.

Not getting to the bottom, I never voted for it. But I did get to my own bottom and wiped it.

Steemit hasn’t been around for long, so it’s not steeped in ancient traditions and established protocols, unlike say Twitter or Facebook.

We can all write posts however long we want. But I suspect that in a high speed modern environment, very few people actually read much anyway. They scroll down the page as fast as possible, then vote if the page seems worthy enough. A marathon length session of finger scrolling just gives an impression of worthiness.

So if less is more, what length would be like a gripping 1500m final? We all have different attention spans, and this is a very personal thing. But I really don’t think many of us are really the concentration camp thin marathon runners that we are all pretending to be.

What I find holds my attention is about five to 10 short paragraphs, with a picture between each paragraph. And that’s it; then I want to vote and wipe my arse.

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SIFT666 aka Ian Gregson is a professional marathon runner and crypto-currency investor from Wellington, New Zealand.
In between reading Steemit posts on the toilet and wiping his arse, he likes to watch YouTube videos about the rituals of primitive social media formats and is currently developing a new purple website portal to rival Steemit called http://www.frot.co.nz

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