Participation inequality (the 90-9-1 rule).

Back in 2006, Jakob Nielsen coined the phrase participation inequality, referring to participation by online communities. He says that online social network activity is generated largely by a small number of the community in a pattern following a zipf curve.

Nielsen sums up participation inequality in the 90-9-1 rule

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9%of users contribute from time to timebut other priorities dominate their time.
• 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.

Earlier studies also suggest a similar distribution. For example, researchers looking at Usenet newsgroups, CompuServe bulletin boards, Internet mailing lists, and internal discussion boards in big companies found that some 27% of the postings were from people who posted only a single message. Conversely, the most active 3% of posters contributed 25% of the messages.

Fast forwarding, in 2006 there were about 1.1 billion internet users with about 55 million blogs (5%). Only about 0.1% of the blogs are updated daily.

It seems then that a disproportionately small number of internet users are generating the content, views and general trends on that are coming through the medium. This is a great quote from Nielsen that succinctly states the phenomenon in the context of amazon.com reviews :

”Furthermore, 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. 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.”

In another one of my posts I suggested segmenting the community as a way to incentivise participation (particularly in the enterprise setting). I suggested categorising the user base as one of the following

• Content contributor (mostly consumes, very occasionally contributes)
• Peer producer (has made an important contribution that is of value to the peer community)
• Mass collaborator (highly active, recognised authority and domain expert).

What does Nielsen suggest to encourage participation by the community?

• Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
• Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
• Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
• Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
• Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.