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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

Just because people can create and publish does not mean they want to.

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.

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I suggest that, prior to the Internet, the actual proportion was much less than 1%, simply because the barriers to contributing were higher.

I have no actual data, of course. Finding some would be interesting.

As an example, my high school class of 310 students had several original bands which easily surpasses the 1% mark for creators. Considering the context of internet posting, "good" or "famous" really don't come into it. In the pre-internet or offline world, 1 in 100 people being content creators seems a trivial threshold to cross.

I'd say that the further you go back, the higher the conent creator ratio was. The absence of storage is what made it possible and the absence of storage is why it wasn't conserved.

What do you do when there is no music?

You start to sing.

How many of those bands played for the public? How many made a CD, tape, or record (depending on how old you are)? I'll stop before I ask if any of them produced a commercial album; I bet I know that answer.

"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.

"Reading comments on local news websites can be terrifying"

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 always find that political discussion that take place between me and random strangers in the comment sections on websites are always filled with trolls or crazy people. Neither of which I want to waste my time on.

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