1% rule
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct users, so all we can do is guess.
The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.
Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:
posters logged-in
--------- * ---------
logged-in total
= 0.36 * 0.23
= 0.0828
Edit: I've added something above though.
I suspect it's just noise. Perhaps our users are particularly honest and don't goof off on HN while working at home any more than they do while working at the office.
> Perhaps our users are particularly honest
Or particularly dishonest and have historically goofed off on HN at the office everyday until they ran out of content to read!
I also switch between networks as my mobile GSM and portable wifi are different providers.
I'm one of those people who pause before responding, because I'm thinking through my response before speaking, rather than blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
I find overthinking a response can also be inhibiting as I can fall into the "do I really need to say that...and now", so I don't.
Of course the existence of guidelines does not imply the existence of guideline-following.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20422094
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18363410
Those are both a bit too bureaucratic to be what the HN community finds intellectually interesting. There are a lot of submissions like this, often from trade journals, and they rarely do well because they lack motivation for a non-specialist audience to find them interesting. Usually there needs to be something tasty to entice the reader in, some hope of curiosity being satisfied. You can sometimes help with that by posting an initial comment in the thread explaining why you personally found an article interesting, especially if there's something non-obvious about it.
Also another one of my links includes Direct which is a healthcare technology that provides secure communication for clinicians that uses identity vetting to ensure the recipient is who they say they are. I wish it had wider adoption.
What might work better is writing a blog-style article about each of these: what's new, what's different, why it matters—and then linking to some of these other more enterprisey or bureaucratic sources. If you decide to work on that, or know someone who is, feel free to contact hn@ycombinator.com because we might be able to give some tips about how to structure it for HN appeal. "New opportunities for startups in healthcare" is definitely a theme with a lot of HN juice, if presented the right way. "A healthcare revolution is taking place" is another.
One thing that would help is if the voice presenting this material comes from someone the community perceives as a peer—not necessarily an HN member but someone who could be. When first impressions suggest something dry and managerial, it gets pattern-matched into the same category as rote bureaucratic or industry sources, and people quickly close the tab.
It's of course possible that some people are clever enough that we don't even know what they're getting away with. But I can tell you that HN's anti-voting-ring software catches a great many cases. So many, in fact, that we'll often go through that list and remove the penalty on particularly good submissions, because sometimes people were clueless about trying to promote otherwise good content.
Edit: the other thing is that we regularly get independent confirmations that the anti-voting-ring software works...so at least it's not totally off.
Never heard the term "brigading" before... but yeah I see that behavior elsewhere a lot... the regulars who echo-chamber each other.
People who choose to spend their time doing that are, I think, just wasting their time. Since I am skeptical by default a cacophony of voices doesn't convince me of anything other than there's a mob afoot.
Share what you find interesting and let the curiosity and comments fall where they may.
Any way to divide logged in weekly sessions by all weekly sessions, or something like that?
Though I don't know how widespread such usage is.
I was surprised it wasn't even higher, since I remember it as having been 95% in some past analysis. This is more likely because I measured it differently than because something massively changed.
Most of the time when I submit something, I’m on my phone, so I’m always logged, because session never ends.
If I had to log in every time, for sure I will browse « anonymously ». But once your logged in, why bother log out ?
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
The other problem is that if the 1% Rule has any validity, then this is true of the internet in general, so you can't really meaningfully single out HN. I agree that finding communities that deviate from the rule would be interesting, if they weren't super small. (Super small communities are interesting for other reasons.)
By the way, if you saw the number of times we email people out of the blue about their HN submissions, offering them help with making them more interesting to the community, or simply letting them know that we were re-upping their post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), you might feel a bit less like this place is corrupt and so on. Optimizing for curiosity is the way we try to manage HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.
Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.
Only accept pre-defined labels everyone agreed on + references to existing answers?
Alternatively only allow a refutation format which is simple to validate.
And make it clear that votes are only a show of sentiment since this is not a democracy we are talking about.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship
Writing for online credit, audience, influence, and/or "imaginary internet points" may not be money, but they are all extrinsic motivators in the sense Schopenhauer references.
I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again.
It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.
I think the point about shamelessly pretending to understand, though, is a subtler question, and difficult to address. I follow people on a lot of topics I don't know about, and I've occasionally discovered later down the line than they're full of crap. And I realise in retrospect that I've helped them do it, upvoting seemingly well-researched answers because I appreciated the effort.
It really highlights the difficulty of figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority, and I could see myself being drawn into some reality-denying group a la flat-earthers or antivaxxers just because I happened to follow the wrong people at the start, and on their advice reject other answers.
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
"People who provide challenging opinions are not trolling so long as they are not deviating from the conversation at hand. There are some people whose only goal is to attain emotional harmony. When a challenging opinion is encountered it is easy for some people to view this disruption to the social norm as trolling, when it likely isn't."
"Some people are easily offended. When a person engages in a conversation directly without distraction they aren't trolling simply because you became emotional."
Which will lead most people passing by to consider that the topic is mostly driven from the point of view of this minority.
This is why we hear a lot about the SJW, anti-vax, the flat earther and so on these days: they make a lot of noise online, even if IRL we never see them because there are so few of them.
This is also why we can see extreme political point of views rising, because people are embolden to join in, reading mass of unchallenged content, pandering to their fear. IRL, they may not, it would not be socially acceptable and the barrier to entry would be bigger.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-...
There are also big differences within this 1%. Even among the people who write regularly, there is probably a tiny minority that generates most of the text. Imagine people with no life, spending each day at least 10 hours online, typing without thinking too much, which allows them to post at least one comment each minute... doing this for years. Your comments are mostly lost in this ocean.
There are many notable accounts, from leaders and experts in the community, who don't make that list.
Popularity and prolificity are not measures of quality.
I think of that sometimes when writing. I try to avoid, for example, abbreviations: It's shorter for me to write, but it means 99 other people will need to decipher them.
Or not editing my post, things like that, that might save me time, but are multiplied by 99 on the other end.
IMPACT
~3.9m
people reached
Life is about emotions and regret. If you don't have any emotions or regrets, you haven't lived. I hope people internalize that as well. Also, my top peeve on social media these days are virtue signaling goody-two-shoes. The paternalistic moralizing and talking down to isn't my cup of tea. If people wanted that, they could go read Aesop's Fables.
(* Per Github traffic stats.)
This is something important to take into account. I can be a lurker in Hacker News but a top contributor in my towns gardeners forum.
Any given person has a maximum time that can dedicate to lurk or contribute. But, one hour of lurking has way more coverage than one hour of contributing. e.g. I can read Reddit, Hacker News, and Wikipedia and still have time left to eat breakfast. But, I want to contribute a new Wikipedia article, probably I will need that complete hour or even more. So, I just contribute to 1 community while lurking in the rest.
Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk : contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.
This is not directly related to your comment (although the comment I didn't post was), but it's another interesting personal observation to add to the pile.
(PS: Yes, what I wrote above was ironic on purpose.)
JS Mill, On Liberty
That still holds true. Though it helps profoundly to not insist on being wrong.
Which I try to do. Not always successfully.
There are some downvotes, though on balance I've been better received than I'd expected.
Sometimes researching on your own to indicate you've attempted clarification, helps. "Did you mean / are you referring to X? ..."
The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special.
The 1% of people who contribute to an online community are either people who've gotten to the point that they think they have something to contribute, or they're crapflooders with nothing better to do.
Sometimes a few people (say, 1-in-10-million) rise above the ruckus and do something exceptional, or lay the groundwork for a future generation to build upon. In the last two centuries we've had a series of developments by people who laid the foundation for our species to achieve liftoff: James Clerk Maxwell, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Hewlett & Packard, Grace Hopper, William Shockley, and a hundred thousand remarkable/mildly-remarkable others.
Hopefully in the next few decades our species can capitalize on the foundations provided by our predecessors, and we can make it into orbit.
But most people are "average" or below average. My pseudonym started as my reports of an unremarkable person trying to make observations of average people's struggles. I grew up in a top 10% income household (parents took my sibling and myself on vacations), had a reasonable college fund (which was not well-spent), and didn't appreciate how the other 90% lived until I started driving around in my taxi.
Our present engineered shutdown of the economy for a significant percentage of the 90% of people who are no longer needed as farmers should be used as an opportunity to reconsider how things are done for the 99% of people who are just trying their best to get by.
Turns out the line was upgraded by the phone company, but the old modem never removed. So there was a new phone line connected to a new modem connected to nothing. Next to it a literally crumbling phone line, an old modem thrown on the ground and buried under a mess of boxes and overheating, connected to their core router. Monitoring was a mess of statistics from the old and new system thrown together, so nobody noticed for over 2 years.
Why she was the only complainer at that office, I will never understand. But she stopped complaining that very day.
Really gives you a perspective on where an individual's life fits into the grand scheme of things. If you don't make it into the history books, in a 100 years once everyone who ever knew you as a person has passed it'll be as if you never existed at all.
- The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber the latter.
- The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time.
Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of (often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users. The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a reflection of human behavior as a whole.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
When considered against all profiles which had posted at least once, which gets around the forced-account dynamic, the comparison of 0.16% vs. 5.09%, is ... approximately π%: 3.1434185% Much closer to the 1% rule, and probably more accurately reflecting actual lurkers, which should bring it even closer in line.
https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...
NB: The research above was based on methods I'd developed, and reached results quite similar to my own, though it was done independently and I had no idea it was performed until Eric Enge published it.
Communicating just how thin active G+ usership was, to many of those active I=users, proved surprisingly hard. People have little innate grasp of statistics or very large numbers -- 2.2 billion+ profiles at the time.
Also, MAU (monthly active users) is a far better measure than regisration counts.
Especially for mandatory accounts.
> The 1% rule is of course just another way of saying that the distribution of contributions follows a Power Law Distribution, which means that the level of inequality gets more drastic as you look at smaller subsets of users.
> Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule.
> 167,113 of Amazons book reviews were contributed by just a few "top-100" reviewers; the most prolific reviewer had written 12,423 reviews. How anybody can write that many reviews — let alone read that many books — is beyond me.
> YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of videos without watching them.
> If you consume any content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways. I don't really know what to do with this observation except to note that it seems like it's worth keeping in mind when using the Internet.
Of course, that post's author is clearly insane. With 72k reputation and 1000 posts on Stack Exchange, I'm proudly insane. And if you're about to reply with a witty comment, you might just be insane, too. ;)
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
This struck me as a bit funny. I can imagine the 87% being the NSA, BND and other law enforcement watching the activity on the forum.
It seemed then that more individuals participated then, than do today (literally, those Sam individuals have fallen off).
Anyway, I wonder at what size of “community” this principle takes hold. Certainly, some form of it is true at the scale of modern social media as mentioned above, and it seems the same for the quarterly class updates that come from my college. But at 20 people we seem to have a sort of “small group dynamics” principle take over.
And maybe, then the right way to think about this is that as the groups size approaches one, I should be applying this model to groups as a whole (“in a collection of small groups, only 1% flourish, 9% stay stagnant, and 90% are silent”).
( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation :-) )
What a broad statement
Although, I would say it's an interesting take on Amazon reviews. A place not many people believe could be as popping as it is.
> The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 99% of the people who view that content.
or
> 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community , stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk .
To them it's just interesting, interesting, ah wow, next thing, ok cool...that sort of thing. It's like rolling down the windows in your car, letting in some outside air. Sharing is fun, in part because the personally-felt pressure to _do_ in response (learn about it, make something of it) is low, in their experience.
The 99% audience is comprised of a lot of people who are a FOMO audience, and this flow can create serious stress for the portion of those people who read about a new idea and they feel the need to _do_ something about it. Meanwhile the 1% crew are often sharing third-party info briefly and broadly, with brief commentary, but no real interest or pressure to seriously do something or make something.
IMO each group can be said to carry really impressive gifts/benefits. And encouraging lurkers to post is always nice, but many of them also secretly wish for a more inviting / less critical community. HN has a _lot_ of commenters ready to smash the next idea into bits by intuiting its flaws, and some will naturally take that as a sign of a toxic community, or at least one that isn't as welcoming in their view. It's tough to work on this issue because it can radically affect the balance of the community psychology and upset larger groups of people.
For Profiles, odds of being deleted (usually a banning consequence AFAICT) was far higher for those which had posted than those which hadn't.
Given churn in troll and spam accounts, percentages can be quite high, even multiples of legitimate accounts.
Both observations based on outside measurements -- I am not and have never been a Google employee.
https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html
> THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
Reflecting on my internet posting history, sometimes it does seem like a whole lot of nothing. But I still like it.