1% rule (Internet culture)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The founders of Twitter were right. When a thought is on the top of my mind, writing a blog post about it is hard. Sending a <=140 character message about it is easy.
Lowering the barriers to entry can be a great strategy for something, especially something that requires a lot of participation to work correctly, to gain traction.
Other examples include Xbox online which is horrific.
Now that you know this, why not write short, 1 or 2 sentence blog posts? There's nothing preventing that.
Contributed content without the ability to select for the best or most appropriate content just becomes so much mud to wade through.
Depending on the forum and behavior of participants, I find that the best discussions are relatively small. With the right people, a small handful of participants, often as few as 2-3. More adds to the mix, but you pretty quickly run into the trolls, me-too's, derailers, and others, and the costs that they impose (by both discouraging and obscuring quality content) increase rapidly. What Metcalfe's law fails to take into account (especially for forum discussions) isn't just that not all contributions are equal, but many are negative.
I've seen well-designed systems scale to a few thousand participants, though this generally requires a great deal of reserve from many. At those scales, keeping track of who's who is hard, and Dunbar's number seems to be pretty well established. Roughly 150 active participants (which is to say, 1,500 - 15,000 members, with an allowance above and below that) seems to be the maximum manageable size barring some pretty fancy tricks and very methodical moderation.
I've seen subreddits scale to 100,000 - 1,000,000 users, and retain decorum, but I also wouldn't exactly call what's happening in them conversation.
It's considered that Wikipedia works because the barriers are high to contribute. (Learning mark up)
Mark up is not a high barrier to entry.
so i'd rather say: for everything created, there are either 100 people expressing an opinion and 1000 people reading it / or none.
It's probably lower in other endevours, e.g., less than 1% of people can play basketball at a level that the average person would actively choose to watch on a regular basis.
Morbius's Law: At Internet scale Sturgeon's law is six-sigma compliant: 99.99966% of everything is crud.
Your filtering / content surfacing algorithms had best take this into consideration.
On the other hand, kicking ideas into the mix and seeing what others do with them can strengthen that muscle.
At least for some people.
Or that you simply have high standards for what you "publish", and prefer to be an expert on a topic before sounding off about it. Nothing wrong with that.
Morbius's Law: At Internet scale Sturgeon's law is six-sigma compliant: 99.99966% of everything is crud.
Prior to the internet, physical media like books, newspapers, and music certainly had a similar distribution. Consuming takes little effort, provides stimulation and enjoyment whether http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, /r/AdviceAnimals or Rolling Stone magazine.
A study looking at which demographics choose to participate in which communities would interest me. Reading comments on local news websites can be terrifying, but my parents would be more likely than me to participate becoming that "1%". Other communities like Live Journal, Reddit, or deviantART appeal to a different sets of 1%ers.
edit: Stats on views vs upvotes vs comments would be an interesting metric for reddit or HN to publish.
I have no actual data, of course. Finding some would be interesting.
What do you do when there is no music?
You start to sing.
"Famous" does not come into the picture, but one thing the Internet has done is make publication possible. It is the difference between no one listening to your band and no one being able to listen. But depending on how you look at it, the difference between 0 and 1 is either tiny or infinite.
That's a very interesting topic, locally paid political astroturfers sloganeer so much at each other, that everyone else has been driven off the local news website comments section. Too toxic. People who want to comment on the news have to use FB or other social media. Another similar system might be spammers and flakes on CL, or spammers on whatever is left of usenet in 2014.
I'd theorize that the presence of spam shrinks the total pool while the ratio remains the same, but this is a very weak gut feeling.
I think an academic paper on the topic of spam suppressing interaction would have interesting financial implications, as the only thing keeping the lights on at the local newspaper (and some other places) is ads from pageviews, so spam may have a modelable financial impact on those operations. Depending on the result, this might either encourage new anti-spam startups, or wipe out the whole spam filtering industry (and probably, discussion forums as well)
I co-founded a company that built and managed private online communities for large brands, and the fact that the sites were private/invite-only and facilitated meant the engagement levels were often much higher than 90-9-1.
Here are some of the factors that we noticed could change the ratio for our clients - private/public forums, ease of content creation, whether the site is moderated, anonymous accounts, commonalities between members, site usability and the difficulty of registration (setting higher barriers to register can actually create higher engagement).
Your mileage will likely vary...
I recently completed an online class where the final announcement reported 1100 people passed and got their statement of accomplishment, unknown number failed, so total population at least 1100, and coursera forums list each read (not distinct readers, each time someone reads, even if its 10 times per individual) and a typical forum post never exceeded 50 or so reads, although a couple legendary ones got up to 300 or even 500. There were at least tens of posts.
So at least one CS class on one MOOC had stats around 10% read any individual post, about 1% create a post and/or respond. So the 1% rule is partially correct although the 99% lurk is about ten times too high. I'm not sure what you call someone who's in the community but doesn't even read the posts.
I've been informed discussion forums are critical, but most students didn't use them and I found them useless other than a waste of time. Then again one course does not define the experience of all courses, which is where an actual research paper with real data would be interesting. I still have the gut feeling forums will turn out useless; after all, who's more likely to be correct, google/SO/Reddit or a small forum of mostly confused students?
In Wikipedia's case, there are also those who destroy content.
I am an active member of the shoe community NikeTalk, and lurkers are almost a daily subject on that site. Lurkers in a way are actually looked down upon from active community members (not me personally), since they get quick access to helpful information on shoe releases without out having to share anything to help others. If they saw this rule of thumb, it would probably be serious fuel to their fire.
Maybe, but it probably taught you a little about civil discourse, rational thinking & reasoned argument, and gave you some practice typing. I know it did all those things for me :)
I avoid diluting those great comments with my one-liners.
(I am not saying this to slight the parent comment. My comment seemed related to his so I'm putting it here.)
I truly and utterly do not understand why its not sparkline'ed yet, and I'm sure there is a plugin for it, but I wish karma was a sparkline, by default, simply. Is it too much flair?
Seriously, karma flowed like water for whatever reason back then. Most of the super high point accounts built themselves up back then, including myself.
Proverbs 17:28
Vivian Stanshall. At four in the afternoon.