The Pareto Rule for Social Networks | Hacker News Reader

The Pareto Rule for Social Networks

5 pointsahsonwardak10 comments

How many agree with this assertion? Twenty percent of Facebookers drive eighty percent of the content - i.e. posted items, profile changes, notes, interesting wall posts. I guess that the same could go for MySpace or LinkedIn. There's always a small collection of people offering content, and many more just stalking and reading it. It could even go for this: Hacker News.

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Where's the data?! Just calling Pareto's rule on every new phenomena does not work. Asking us to agree or disagree on something that none of us really has any data on is beyond pointless and actually harmful.

For instance, Yahoo data with Flickr shows that less than 10% of people actually contribute content. So Pareto's rule does not apply there. But only Facebook knows how it works with their users. You can't just blindly apply these "laws" to various user groups and expect them to be even half true.

The point of Pareto's rule is not so much that the numbers must be 80 and 20. The essence of what Pareto proved is that the few(causes) are responsible for the many(effects). So Pareto's principle is very much at work in Flickr.

I agree with this point, and it what I intended. The key to the Pareto rule is that it should drive personal effort. For sites like Facebook, I think that you would just attract the content drivers (the 20%), and then the other 80% follow.

Think about it in terms of the Tipping Point. Go to the mavens/connectors first. They have all the knowledge know everyone. They'll do the buzz marketing for you and persuade others to join. Another term would be early adopter. I know that I have personal done this for Meebo.

The "Pareto Rule" specifically refers to an 80/20 ratio.

Pareto didn't prove anything, he just made an observation about the italian economy. Other people noticed the ratio elsewhere, and named the rule after him.

Agreed. I don't know about the particular %, but sure, you are always going to have some users more active than others. It is certainly true for Hacker News. I'm sure a significant % of people using this site haven't even bothered to register. Perhaps pg could enlighten us as to an estimate of the actual %?

I remember seeing a lot of stories 6-12 months ago that talked about the 1% rule for user-contributions to participatory web sites. 1% create content, 10% interact with it, and 89% pass it by.

But according to this fairly recent article from Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN17436388200..., the percentage of people that actually generate content is even lower. For example, only 0.16% of visitors to YouTube upload videos. And 0.2% of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos. Wikipedia fares better with 4.6% of visits used to make edits. But it's all a far cry from 20% of users generating content.

I think the YTMND guy put it best when he realized that all of the top content on his site is adaptations (to put it nicely) of content created elsewhere. None totally original.

So that's about 99.99999% vs 0.000001%.

So beware of creating a site where users have to create totally original content. Sites like hacker news have it easy in that respect.

What percentage of moviegoers are filmmakers? From that perspective, Facebook is unimaginably creator-driven.

But isn't this because the tools of production for film are expensive and complicated?

Sure, in 5 years 20% of people won't be making hollywood films, but in 5 years it could be that 20% of moviegoers make their own movies on occasion.

What percentage of people on YouTube make their own videos? That is a fairer comparison.

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