Slack archive, 2016–2026 · 474 channels · 46,283 messages
Ten years of thinking, in 33,643 URLs.
The shape of a decade
Peak year: 2021 at 6,559 URLs. The Web3 chapter, fully documented.
The obsession arc
Crypto/Web3 went from zero to 17% of everything I read in 2021, then collapsed just as fast. No other topic moved like this.
Peak share was 2022 at 21% -- but 2021 was when it consumed the entire conversation. By 2025 it had returned to background noise.
What I was reading
98.2% categorised. Sized proportionally by volume.
Going deeper, not wider
At the peak in 2021, I was reading from 1,816 different domains in a single year. Casting as wide a net as possible. By 2025 that had fallen to 641.
That is not a decline. It is a focus. The same intellectual energy, concentrated. Fewer sources. Better questions.
Era by era
Learning the industry, saving the frameworks. 1,618 links over three years.
Volume accelerates. Strategy, culture, and media converge into a daily practice.
Peak year: 6,559 URLs in 2021. Every NFT project, every think piece, fully archived.
AI arrives. The archive turns outward: documenting what's being made, not just observed. #claude-code is now the #3 most active channel in the workspace -- you are logging the practice in real time.
A CV in channel names
The top channel per era tells you more than any job title.
| Years | Era | Top channel | What it meant |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016–18 | Building craft | tools | Collecting instruments. Learning what serious people use. |
| 2019–20 | Industry immersion | strat-weekly | Strategy as a weekly discipline. The pandemic accelerated everything. |
| 2021–22 | The Web3 chapter | brands-nft | Where brands were going, before most brands understood it. |
| 2023–24 | AI arrives | ai-artificial-intelligence | The new frontier. 1,233 links in two years; the same obsession, a different subject. |
| 2025–26 | Building in public | cultural-interface | Where culture and technology meet. The channel that outlasted every trend. |
#cultural-interface and #ai-artificial-intelligence together account for 63% of all activity in the workspace. Two channels. One thesis: culture is the frame, AI is the material.
The channels
The archive has a heartbeat
Ten years of timestamps reveal a circadian rhythm. Two peaks, one valley, one unmistakable day.
Wednesday: 5,701 links -- 28% more than Sunday. The week builds to a mid-week peak and never fully switches off at the weekend.
Morning peak 9-10am. Evening peak 10-11pm. Only 25 links ever saved at 4am -- you do actually sleep.
The actual reading diet
Strip out X, LinkedIn, and Instagram and the archive reveals what I was actually reading. Substack (811 combined) and Medium (519 combined) dwarf any single publication.
OpenSea and Decrypt in the top 10 date this archive precisely. The Drum and Campaign Live confirm the agency years. Hypebeast and Vogue Business (89) sit alongside Bloomberg -- that is the brief.
The turn
For nine years, I saved links to other people's work. In 2026, I started saving links to my own. 359 times in a single year, against a combined total of 5 in all the years before.
That is not a vanity metric. It is a direction of travel.
When I think hardest
April is not just busy. It is nearly double January. Spring is when the ideas arrive.
April: 4,264 links. January: 2,362. March and September are the reboot months. December barely slows down.
Slack was my second brain before second brains were a product. Ten years of links is ten years of thinking – made searchable.
Mike Litman, 2026This data was extracted and categorised from a 10-year personal Slack workspace. 98.2% of 33,643 URLs were categorised into 25 topics using a combination of explicit domain mapping and heuristic pattern matching.