{"id":139,"date":"2006-10-12T04:20:31","date_gmt":"2006-10-12T03:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/wordpress\/?p=139"},"modified":"2016-04-30T10:28:39","modified_gmt":"2016-04-30T09:28:39","slug":"lurkers-outnumber-contributors-9-to-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/12\/lurkers-outnumber-contributors-9-to-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Lurkers Outnumber Contributors 9 to 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Jakob Nielsen <a href=\"http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/participation_inequality.html\">http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/participation_inequality.html<\/a> has a great article up today. He postulates that in most online communities, 90% are lurkers, 9% of users contribute a little and 1% of users account for almost all the action.<br \/>All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don&#8217;t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early &#8217;90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research.<br \/>User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don&#8217;t contribute).<\/li>\n<li>9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.<\/li>\n<li>1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don&#8217;t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they&#8217;re commenting on occurs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It reminds me of a saying of one of my professors during my medical studies in Vienna, which I shall remember for the rest of my life. He said to me: \u00bbYou have to know one thing. If there are 100% sick people, then you can open the following accout. 90% of the 100% recover without any medical support, remain 10%. From these 10% die 9%, and, the tiny rest of 1% accounts for medical interventions.<\/p>\n<p>But does this mean we should stop to intervene? Of course, not! <br \/>The same I think applies to blogging and other social activities on the internet. By just doing it things evolve, change, even if we can&#8217;t anticipate nor predict the outcome. The final outcome is of minor importance, the process of doing it is the essential. <br \/>For this reason it is definitely needed to cut down expectations and see the achievement as a welcome by-product of the process.<\/p>\n<p>I am currently in San Francisco. Tomorrow, I have to go for running shoes. I&#8217;ll keep you posted. Here is a foto from my first lunch in town.<br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/biest-blog.typepad.com\/photos\/uncategorized\/lichtimpressionen_1136.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; float: left;\" title=\"Lichtimpressionen_1136\" alt=\"Lichtimpressionen_1136\" src=\"http:\/\/biest-blog.typepad.com\/biest_blog\/images\/lichtimpressionen_1136.jpg\" width=\"390\" height=\"293\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don&#8217;t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2294],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4778,"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/4778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biestmilch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}