![]() Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans). If a party nominates a candidate supported by the "netroots," it will almost certainly lose because such candidates' positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Similarly, if you're a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you're getting an unrepresentative sample. This can cause trouble for several reasons: ![]() On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. The problem is that the overall system is not representative of average web users. If lurkers want to contribute, they are usually allowed to do so. Participation inequality is not necessarily unfair because some users are more equal than others, to misquote Animal Farm. How anybody can write that many reviews - let alone read that many books - is beyond me, but it's a classic example of participation inequality. A quick glance at, for example, showed that the site had sold thousands of copies of a book that had only 12 reviews, meaning that less than 1% of customers contribute reviews.įurthermore, at the time I wrote this, 167,113 of Amazon's book reviews were contributed by just a few "top-100" reviewers the most prolific reviewer had written 12,423 reviews. Participation inequality exists in many places on the web. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule. Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people - 0.003% of its users - contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits. According to Wikipedia's "about" page, it has only 68,000 active contributors, which is 0.2% of the 32 million unique visitors it has in the U.S. Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers. With blogs, the rule is more like 95–5–0.1. Worse, in 2006 there are only 1.6 million postings per day because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.īlogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90–9–1 rule that characterizes most online communities. There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. And you would never hear from the silent majority of lurkers. ![]() More importantly, such inequities would give you a biased understanding of the community, because many differences almost certainly exist between people who post a lot and those who post a little. ![]() Obviously, if you want to assess the "feelings of the community" it's highly unfair if one subgroup's 19,000 members have the same representation as another subgroup's 580,000 members. In Whittaker et al.'s Usenet study, a randomly selected posting was equally likely to come from one of the 580,000 low-frequency contributors or one of the 19,000 high-frequency contributors. Conversely, the most active 3% of posters contributed 25% of the messages. A study of more than 2 million messages on Usenet found that 27% of the postings were from people who posted only a single message. 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.īefore the web, researchers documented participation inequality in media such as Usenet newsgroups, CompuServe bulletin boards, Internet mailing lists, and internal discussion boards in big companies.9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time. ![]() 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).User participation often more or less follows a 90–9–1 rule: When you plot the amount of activity for each user, the result is a Zipf curve, which shows as a straight line in a log-log diagram. ![]()
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