13 ms·

1% rule

465 points by punnerud 7y ago

ecdavis 7y ago
On top of that, some percentage of users who do contribute content are just recycling/reiterating content they've seen have success in that community before. Reposts, memes, predictable opinions, etc. The number of people who actively create the culture of an online community (and, I suspect, offline communities) is pretty small.
- rzzzt 7y ago
  Where does the novelty element start, though? Someone could come and argue that your comment is also predictable, as is my reply below it.
  - nhumrich 7y ago
    Thats what is most interesting about human innovation and creativity in general. There are very very very few original ideas out there. Almost any idea anyone has had, a large number of people have had it. And most innovation is just tiny tweaks to existing formulas, over time. In fact, if you understand the backstory behind most innovations, you realize it really wasn't all that impressive. There were many proposed models for flight before the wright brothers. They stumbled upon the right mixture. Modern day car fuel engines have essentially evolved over centuries of perfecting "torches" (fire and gas to create heat) The people who make history are simply the first ones to act upon these thoughts. So, you become a content creator/culture setter, by simply being the first one to vocalize your thoughts.
    - casefields 7y ago
      That is essentially the point in Gladwell's famous article "In the Air | Who says big ideas are rare?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air
  - EGreg 7y ago
    Let me share an original thought I just came up with. As Paul Graham recently wrote, you can be an accidental moderate because you disagree with people out of intellectual honesty and critically analyzing the positions in an effort to learn something. So people like that contribute to steering conversations towards the truth. (PS: Yes, what I wrote above was ironic on purpose.)
    - kthejoker2 7y ago
      > The general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. JS Mill, On Liberty
superfamicom 7y ago
I feel like this should take spam and bots into account. I run a wiki and most edits are by bots that I rollback. I don't add captcha to not further dissuade people from contributing.
- alexdumitru 7y ago
  Add a hidden checkbox. If checked, it's definitely a bot. You get rid of more than 99.99% of bots, from my experience.
lerie1982 7y ago
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. What a broad statement
cycloptic 7y ago
I hope many of us internalized this early. It's not very accurate, but I try to think of this as meaning that on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people, multiplied by either the upvote count on the thread (for HN) or the number of active followers I have (for Twitter). It has helped me to always think this to myself before posting something. I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.
- xwdv 7y ago
  Why should we care about what the silent 99% think? We’re the top 1%, everyone else wishes they either had something to say or the courage to say it.
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    Such 1%, wow.
  - Nition 7y ago
    Being in the 1% that contributes does not necessarily mean you're the top 1% by quality of thought.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  But is all that thinking really worth it? I mean surely you don't want to say too much bullshit, or mislead people... But take this comment; would I really post it if I thought it would waste the time of some hundreds of people reading it? Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    I wish downvotes had a text field feedback option. I often downvote comments for reasons that may not be obvious to the author. That could be ripe for abusive messages, but still think it's a noteworthy idea.
mikekchar 7y ago
I've been doing a Twitch development stream (a couple hours a day working on a dwarf fortress game in Rust). In the stream, I'll have about 90% lurkers, 10% people who engage in chat and about 1% that have sent me actual PRs for the code :-) It's very interesting. (BTW, I should be streaming now... Bad Mike...)
isseu 7y ago
I really like this reddit post about this topic: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
- Fiveplus 7y ago
  I wish there was a similar analysis for comments left on boards like this one and reddit (which I left earlier this year because the website just isn't what it used to be). Although, I would say it's an interesting take on Amazon reviews. A place not many people believe could be as popping as it is.
saagarjha 7y ago
Hello, hundred people that'll read this comment! I can't hear what you have to say, but hopefully it's not too scathing.
k__ 7y ago
I had the feeling that there are more creators lately, but since Smartphones and mobile internet got big, there are also magnitudes more lurkers online, so it's probably still right
woopwoop 7y ago
I would be very interested in understanding the psychology of the 1%. I would bet they (we? I mostly lurk, but am still probably at least in the top 10%) are a very weird bunch.
- DrNuke 7y ago
  More probably they (we) are selling something... or even themselves?
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  I have worked closely with some phenomenal 1%-ers. :-) They are really efficient at processing broad information in what you could call a shallow manner. They also don't feel the depth-of-comprehension pressure that some of us 99%-ers feel. To them it's just interesting, interesting, ah wow, next thing, ok cool...that sort of thing. It's like rolling down the windows in your car, letting in some outside air. Sharing is fun, in part because the personally-felt pressure to _do_ in response (learn about it, make something of it) is low, in their experience. The 99% audience is comprised of a lot of people who are a FOMO audience, and this flow can create serious stress for the portion of those people who read about a new idea and they feel the need to _do_ something about it. Meanwhile the 1% crew are often sharing third-party info briefly and broadly, with brief commentary, but no real interest or pressure to seriously do something or make something. IMO each group can be said to carry really impressive gifts/benefits. And encouraging lurkers to post is always nice, but many of them also secretly wish for a more inviting / less critical community. HN has a _lot_ of commenters ready to smash the next idea into bits by intuiting its flaws, and some will naturally take that as a sign of a toxic community, or at least one that isn't as welcoming in their view. It's tough to work on this issue because it can radically affect the balance of the community psychology and upset larger groups of people.
- nhumrich 7y ago
  I think it moreso has to do with that we ourselves only put time into so many things. For example, I myself probably read 99 or more articles on HN for every 1 I actually comment on. Take that to a general level, there are a lot of platfoms were I lurk, and very few were I actually participate. Putting your words on the screen takes mental effort that we selectively choose where to focus such efforts
panny 7y ago
What percent get banned? There are plenty of percents who would happily edit pages on wikipedia about politics, but those pages tend to be locked.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  From G+, in the final months of the service, daily creation and deletion of Communities (not Profiles, though a related proxy measure) was in the 1,000s per day. For Profiles, odds of being deleted (usually a banning consequence AFAICT) was far higher for those which had posted than those which hadn't. Given churn in troll and spam accounts, percentages can be quite high, even multiples of legitimate accounts. Both observations based on outside measurements -- I am not and have never been a Google employee.
spsrich2 7y ago
I thought it was the basis of consulting companies as was told to me by an old boss: "if you know 1% more than the other guy you are the expert!"
vpears87 7y ago
Applies well to political involvement of any kind. Or just any social organization supporting a cause
hrdwdmrbl 7y ago
A Redditor did an analysis of Reddit's ratio and it's more like 98-x-y (x and y were not broken out): https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/lets_hear_it_for_the_lurkers_the_vast_majority_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/let...
jcims 7y ago
I blab online quite a bit (in comments only, no blog or anything), but I rarely vote/like/etc. Does that make me more or less of a narcissist?
- kirubakaran 7y ago
  blowhards ⊂ narcissists ( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation :-) )
  - jcims 7y ago
    An astute one at that
dang 7y ago
I once ran the numbers for HN and was surprised at how closely they matched this rule. Maybe I'll do it again. Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct users, so all we can do is guess. The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound. Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total: posters logged-in --------- * --------- logged-in total = 0.36 * 0.23 = 0.0828 So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.
- eindiran 7y ago
  Is there a post you made when you ran the numbers before? I'd be very interested to see that.
  - dang 7y ago
    Nope, and I don't remember how I did it. Edit: I've added something above though.
- airstrike 7y ago
  To add to that, I was wondering earlier today if HN has seen an increase in traffic, this "1% activity", and / or longer visit times now that many of us are WFHing until further notice... I suspect so, but would love to know!
  - 7y ago
nixpulvis 7y ago
I wonder how social distancing is effecting online posting numbers right about now?
Chathamization 7y ago
I think this is a key to understanding online discourse. A lot of the stuff you see is generated by a very small percentage of the users (probably much less than 1% if you look at the numbers[1]), and this small percentage likely consists of the more problematic users. Consider that: - The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber the latter. - The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time. Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of (often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users. The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a reflection of human behavior as a whole. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
- californical 7y ago
  This was a really interesting comment to read that I feel accurately summarizes most of the points being made here. Thanks!
Hokusai 7y ago
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. ... only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content. This is something important to take into account. I can be a lurker in Hacker News but a top contributor in my towns gardeners forum. Any given person has a maximum time that can dedicate to lurk or contribute. But, one hour of lurking has way more coverage than one hour of contributing. e.g. I can read Reddit, Hacker News, and Wikipedia and still have time left to eat breakfast. But, I want to contribute a new Wikipedia article, probably I will need that complete hour or even more. So, I just contribute to 1 community while lurking in the rest.
- LMYahooTFY 7y ago
  Really good points. Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk : contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Unless you're a paid online marketer / shillbot, or maybe some sort of journalist / blogger, I suspect this is true for everyone on the intrawebs.
- smichel17 7y ago
  I had a longer reply that I was going to post, but then it got longer and more nuanced than I wanted to spend the time to type out, so I discarded it instead. I do this quite frequently. This is not directly related to your comment (although the comment I didn't post was), but it's another interesting personal observation to add to the pile.
mitchtbaum 7y ago
https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk
897yh42drj98u0 7y ago
That 1% really flatters themselves if they think of themselves as "creators".
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  Oscar Wilde's got you covered. https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html > THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING Reflecting on my internet posting history, sometimes it does seem like a whole lot of nothing. But I still like it.
taxicabjesus 7y ago
We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other people just as good as you. The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special. The 1% of people who contribute to an online community are either people who've gotten to the point that they think they have something to contribute, or they're crapflooders with nothing better to do. Sometimes a few people (say, 1-in-10-million) rise above the ruckus and do something exceptional, or lay the groundwork for a future generation to build upon. In the last two centuries we've had a series of developments by people who laid the foundation for our species to achieve liftoff: James Clerk Maxwell, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Hewlett & Packard, Grace Hopper, William Shockley, and a hundred thousand remarkable/mildly-remarkable others. Hopefully in the next few decades our species can capitalize on the foundations provided by our predecessors, and we can make it into orbit. But most people are "average" or below average. My pseudonym started as my reports of an unremarkable person trying to make observations of average people's struggles. I grew up in a top 10% income household (parents took my sibling and myself on vacations), had a reasonable college fund (which was not well-spent), and didn't appreciate how the other 90% lived until I started driving around in my taxi. Our present engineered shutdown of the economy for a significant percentage of the 90% of people who are no longer needed as farmers should be used as an opportunity to reconsider how things are done for the 99% of people who are just trying their best to get by.
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the__prestige 7y ago
I find that if I am excited about a subject, I tend to participate a lot more (create/edit) than if I am simply consuming. I think there is a 1% rule for /topics/ as well, i.e. I as a user am interested in actively creating/contributing to 1% of all topics I see...
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thedogeye 7y ago
Commenting just to mess with the ratios on this rule.
- philips4350 7y ago
  count me in too !
  - codegladiator 7y ago
    Hardly making a dent here !
WiPo 7y ago
Well, this kind of disproportion would only be worse in traditional media: dozens of writers serving millions of newspaper/magazine readers.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Even worse, each article has only 1 writer for all readers!
perilunar 7y ago
1% sounds bad, but compared to pre-internet days it's pretty good. Consider a large city newspaper: probably hundreds of journalists and letter writers, but millions of readers, so much less than 1%.
- magicsmoke 7y ago
  Also speaks to the nature of influence and power throughout history. Usually it's only around 1% of the human population that can reach and impact the lives of more than a few hundred others (roughly the size of a small village where you can get to know everyone) and expand their influence over countries and empires of millions. Likewise, history only records the details of the lives of far less than 1% of all people that have ever lived. If you were one of the peasant masses, your entire life is summarized by whatever tidbits of trivia historians can glean from the artifacts from the grave of the one lucky person that they happened to find. Same idea, 1% of all the graves that ever existed serve to illustrate the lives of the rest of humanity to future historians. Really gives you a perspective on where an individual's life fits into the grand scheme of things. If you don't make it into the history books, in a 100 years once everyone who ever knew you as a person has passed it'll be as if you never existed at all.
  - swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
    Even those people in the history books, it's hard to care about them really beyond caricatured silhouettes of who history portrayed them to be.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ladzoppelin 7y ago
Things "even out" here, its been like that for years. The top comments are usually smart with added inflammatory BS that only top comments possess. You can actually find really good advice, about many subjects, right after that first block of unstoppable up-votes.
lonelappde 7y ago
This is not a scientific measurement. "1%" is an idiom for "very few". "9%" is a mismathematization of "10%" meaning "few".
nyfresh 7y ago
Long time lurker here.I often feel I have nothing useful to contribute.So I don't. You're welcome.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aexl 7y ago
  I'm as well a long time lurker. Whenever I contribute something, I feel that it should be helpful for many other people out there. This comment probably isn't...
  - drbacon 7y ago
    Ha! Well you made this lurker laugh, and reply! Also, it is not uncommon for me to write out a reply and then delete it before submitting because I second guess that the comment has value.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Another reason why people avoid contributing: unwritten social rules. New members often step on people's toes and suffer the consequences. As a result, joining a new group can be intimidating. Better to lurk for a while and gain understanding of what is and isn't normal.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  What I discovered, decades ago, was that posting questions, or even better, answers, even wrong ones (unintentionally) is a phenomenal way to learn things. That still holds true. Though it helps profoundly to not insist on being wrong. Which I try to do. Not always successfully.
  - nickpsecurity 7y ago
    I mostly focus on finding people with the answers. One person here I invited to another place specifically because they asked exceptionally, good questions. Most of the time, their questions led to more good answers or just perspectives. I'd like to see more of that.
knzhou 7y ago
This is extended in the post/article "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" [0]. > The 1% rule is of course just another way of saying that the distribution of contributions follows a Power Law Distribution, which means that the level of inequality gets more drastic as you look at smaller subsets of users. > Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule. > 167,113 of Amazons 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. > YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of videos without watching them. > If you consume any content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways. I don't really know what to do with this observation except to note that it seems like it's worth keeping in mind when using the Internet. Of course, that post's author is clearly insane. With 72k reputation and 1000 posts on Stack Exchange, I'm proudly insane. And if you're about to reply with a witty comment, you might just be insane, too. ;) 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
danschumann 7y ago
You're 1 in 100, poster.
pedalpete 7y ago
How should we take it if we have 60%+ of users creating content, and very few lurkers? Is that a good thing? Or under-optimized?
neoddish 7y ago
<h1>NICE!</h1>
dredmorbius 7y ago
For Google+, by one measure (all registered profiles), the "1%" were actually the 0.16% When considered against all profiles which had posted at least once, which gets around the forced-account dynamic, the comparison of 0.16% vs. 5.09%, is ... approximately π%: 3.1434185% Much closer to the 1% rule, and probably more accurately reflecting actual lurkers, which should bring it even closer in line. https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the... NB: The research above was based on methods I'd developed, and reached results quite similar to my own, though it was done independently and I had no idea it was performed until Eric Enge published it. Communicating just how thin active G+ usership was, to many of those active I=users, proved surprisingly hard. People have little innate grasp of statistics or very large numbers -- 2.2 billion+ profiles at the time. Also, MAU (monthly active users) is a far better measure than regisration counts. Especially for mandatory accounts.
hyperman1 7y ago
Same goes for bugs. 90 pct of your users doesn't even report downtime. A report on something non major is rare. I learned to listen to reported problems carefully, however weird.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Depends on the user. Some report every blip in their wifi.
  - hyperman1 7y ago
    Funny you say that. We had someone in a remote office complaining of neverending WIFI problems, but never reproducable. None of the coworkers mentioned any problems. All network statistics said everything fine. One day I happen to be in the neighbourhood so let's take a look. Turns out the line was upgraded by the phone company, but the old modem never removed. So there was a new phone line connected to a new modem connected to nothing. Next to it a literally crumbling phone line, an old modem thrown on the ground and buried under a mess of boxes and overheating, connected to their core router. Monitoring was a mess of statistics from the old and new system thrown together, so nobody noticed for over 2 years. Why she was the only complainer at that office, I will never understand. But she stopped complaining that very day.
  - cxr 7y ago
    Previously: They Might Never Tell You It's Broken https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427996
dfee 7y ago
I remember the days of early social networking: I.e. pre-mass networking like we have now with FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc. It seemed then that more individuals participated then, than do today (literally, those Sam individuals have fallen off). Anyway, I wonder at what size of “community” this principle takes hold. Certainly, some form of it is true at the scale of modern social media as mentioned above, and it seems the same for the quarterly class updates that come from my college. But at 20 people we seem to have a sort of “small group dynamics” principle take over. And maybe, then the right way to think about this is that as the groups size approaches one, I should be applying this model to groups as a whole (“in a collection of small groups, only 1% flourish, 9% stay stagnant, and 90% are silent”).
zw123456 7y ago
There is also the concept of partial consumption. Often you might click on something you think might be interesting, peruse or preview it, then decide it wasn't as interesting as you thought and move on. Did you actually consume that content or did you preview it? There is no way to know if someone is lurking, actually fully consuming the content or simply previewing it. There is probably no way to prove this but my guess is that 90% of the consumers are actually previewers.
lawry 7y ago
I wonder how having the amount of posts you made (like forums do) influences this number. And subsequently how others on the platform respond (since it's in their best interest to be as kind as possible to new posters to make the community grow?)
qwerty123457 7y ago
This applies to real life as well. I'd replace "lurker" with passive, "contributor" with active, and "creator" with changer.
mrunkel 7y ago
> A 2005 study of radical Jihadist forums found 87% of users had never posted on the forums, 13% had posted at least once, 5% had posted 50 or more times, and only 1% had posted 500 or more times.[5] This struck me as a bit funny. I can imagine the 87% being the NSA, BND and other law enforcement watching the activity on the forum.
summerdown2 7y ago
My prediction: this will be the one post where the 1% rule doesn't apply, as a much larger number will be spurred into action by the topic in question - and end up actually saying something.
- kuu 7y ago
  It's funny, because in the list of comments, the comment above yours says he's doing exactly that :)
visarga 7y ago
Wikipedia is confusing. Which is it? > The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 99% of the people who view that content. or > 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community , stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk .
bregma 7y ago
Using the term 'lurker' for consumers implies a pretty negative value judgement. If something like Wikipedia is not there to be consumed but only written (and I've long asserted that wikis are write-only media, but Wikipedia coupled with a good online search engine is not a typical wiki), what is the value of the 1%? Contributing to something nobody reads just becomes an act of masturbation.
yamrzou 7y ago
Related discussion: "Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
ohiovr 7y ago
I estimated that about 1 out of 100 would review and or rate my apps. Except for paid then it was more like 1 out of 25 but that might be an exception.

465 points by punnerud 7y ago

On top of that, some percentage of users who do contribute content are just recycling/reiterating content they've seen have success in that community before. Reposts, memes, predictable opinions, etc. The number of people who actively create the culture of an online community (and, I suspect, offline communities) is pretty small.

rzzzt 7y ago
Where does the novelty element start, though? Someone could come and argue that your comment is also predictable, as is my reply below it.
- nhumrich 7y ago
  Thats what is most interesting about human innovation and creativity in general. There are very very very few original ideas out there. Almost any idea anyone has had, a large number of people have had it. And most innovation is just tiny tweaks to existing formulas, over time. In fact, if you understand the backstory behind most innovations, you realize it really wasn't all that impressive. There were many proposed models for flight before the wright brothers. They stumbled upon the right mixture. Modern day car fuel engines have essentially evolved over centuries of perfecting "torches" (fire and gas to create heat) The people who make history are simply the first ones to act upon these thoughts. So, you become a content creator/culture setter, by simply being the first one to vocalize your thoughts.
  - casefields 7y ago
    That is essentially the point in Gladwell's famous article "In the Air | Who says big ideas are rare?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air
- EGreg 7y ago
  Let me share an original thought I just came up with. As Paul Graham recently wrote, you can be an accidental moderate because you disagree with people out of intellectual honesty and critically analyzing the positions in an effort to learn something. So people like that contribute to steering conversations towards the truth. (PS: Yes, what I wrote above was ironic on purpose.)
  - kthejoker2 7y ago
    > The general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. JS Mill, On Liberty

superfamicom 7y ago

I feel like this should take spam and bots into account. I run a wiki and most edits are by bots that I rollback. I don't add captcha to not further dissuade people from contributing.

alexdumitru 7y ago
Add a hidden checkbox. If checked, it's definitely a bot. You get rid of more than 99.99% of bots, from my experience.

lerie1982 7y ago

> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. What a broad statement

cycloptic 7y ago

I hope many of us internalized this early. It's not very accurate, but I try to think of this as meaning that on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people, multiplied by either the upvote count on the thread (for HN) or the number of active followers I have (for Twitter). It has helped me to always think this to myself before posting something. I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.

xwdv 7y ago
Why should we care about what the silent 99% think? We’re the top 1%, everyone else wishes they either had something to say or the courage to say it.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  Such 1%, wow.
- Nition 7y ago
  Being in the 1% that contributes does not necessarily mean you're the top 1% by quality of thought.
nixpulvis 7y ago
But is all that thinking really worth it? I mean surely you don't want to say too much bullshit, or mislead people... But take this comment; would I really post it if I thought it would waste the time of some hundreds of people reading it? Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  I wish downvotes had a text field feedback option. I often downvote comments for reasons that may not be obvious to the author. That could be ripe for abusive messages, but still think it's a noteworthy idea.

mikekchar 7y ago

I've been doing a Twitch development stream (a couple hours a day working on a dwarf fortress game in Rust). In the stream, I'll have about 90% lurkers, 10% people who engage in chat and about 1% that have sent me actual PRs for the code :-) It's very interesting. (BTW, I should be streaming now... Bad Mike...)

isseu 7y ago

I really like this reddit post about this topic: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Fiveplus 7y ago
I wish there was a similar analysis for comments left on boards like this one and reddit (which I left earlier this year because the website just isn't what it used to be). Although, I would say it's an interesting take on Amazon reviews. A place not many people believe could be as popping as it is.

saagarjha 7y ago

Hello, hundred people that'll read this comment! I can't hear what you have to say, but hopefully it's not too scathing.

k__ 7y ago

I had the feeling that there are more creators lately, but since Smartphones and mobile internet got big, there are also magnitudes more lurkers online, so it's probably still right

woopwoop 7y ago

I would be very interested in understanding the psychology of the 1%. I would bet they (we? I mostly lurk, but am still probably at least in the top 10%) are a very weird bunch.

DrNuke 7y ago
More probably they (we) are selling something... or even themselves?
themodelplumber 7y ago
I have worked closely with some phenomenal 1%-ers. :-) They are really efficient at processing broad information in what you could call a shallow manner. They also don't feel the depth-of-comprehension pressure that some of us 99%-ers feel. To them it's just interesting, interesting, ah wow, next thing, ok cool...that sort of thing. It's like rolling down the windows in your car, letting in some outside air. Sharing is fun, in part because the personally-felt pressure to _do_ in response (learn about it, make something of it) is low, in their experience. The 99% audience is comprised of a lot of people who are a FOMO audience, and this flow can create serious stress for the portion of those people who read about a new idea and they feel the need to _do_ something about it. Meanwhile the 1% crew are often sharing third-party info briefly and broadly, with brief commentary, but no real interest or pressure to seriously do something or make something. IMO each group can be said to carry really impressive gifts/benefits. And encouraging lurkers to post is always nice, but many of them also secretly wish for a more inviting / less critical community. HN has a _lot_ of commenters ready to smash the next idea into bits by intuiting its flaws, and some will naturally take that as a sign of a toxic community, or at least one that isn't as welcoming in their view. It's tough to work on this issue because it can radically affect the balance of the community psychology and upset larger groups of people.
nhumrich 7y ago
I think it moreso has to do with that we ourselves only put time into so many things. For example, I myself probably read 99 or more articles on HN for every 1 I actually comment on. Take that to a general level, there are a lot of platfoms were I lurk, and very few were I actually participate. Putting your words on the screen takes mental effort that we selectively choose where to focus such efforts

panny 7y ago

What percent get banned? There are plenty of percents who would happily edit pages on wikipedia about politics, but those pages tend to be locked.

dredmorbius 7y ago
From G+, in the final months of the service, daily creation and deletion of Communities (not Profiles, though a related proxy measure) was in the 1,000s per day. For Profiles, odds of being deleted (usually a banning consequence AFAICT) was far higher for those which had posted than those which hadn't. Given churn in troll and spam accounts, percentages can be quite high, even multiples of legitimate accounts. Both observations based on outside measurements -- I am not and have never been a Google employee.

spsrich2 7y ago

I thought it was the basis of consulting companies as was told to me by an old boss: "if you know 1% more than the other guy you are the expert!"

vpears87 7y ago

Applies well to political involvement of any kind. Or just any social organization supporting a cause

hrdwdmrbl 7y ago

A Redditor did an analysis of Reddit's ratio and it's more like 98-x-y (x and y were not broken out): https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/lets_hear_it_for_the_lurkers_the_vast_majority_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/let...

jcims 7y ago

I blab online quite a bit (in comments only, no blog or anything), but I rarely vote/like/etc. Does that make me more or less of a narcissist?

kirubakaran 7y ago
blowhards ⊂ narcissists ( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation :-) )
- jcims 7y ago
  An astute one at that

dang 7y ago

I once ran the numbers for HN and was surprised at how closely they matched this rule. Maybe I'll do it again. Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct users, so all we can do is guess. The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound. Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total: posters logged-in --------- * --------- logged-in total = 0.36 * 0.23 = 0.0828 So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.

eindiran 7y ago
Is there a post you made when you ran the numbers before? I'd be very interested to see that.
- dang 7y ago
  Nope, and I don't remember how I did it. Edit: I've added something above though.
airstrike 7y ago
To add to that, I was wondering earlier today if HN has seen an increase in traffic, this "1% activity", and / or longer visit times now that many of us are WFHing until further notice... I suspect so, but would love to know!
- 7y ago

nixpulvis 7y ago

I wonder how social distancing is effecting online posting numbers right about now?

Chathamization 7y ago

I think this is a key to understanding online discourse. A lot of the stuff you see is generated by a very small percentage of the users (probably much less than 1% if you look at the numbers[1]), and this small percentage likely consists of the more problematic users. Consider that: - The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber the latter. - The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time. Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of (often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users. The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a reflection of human behavior as a whole. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

californical 7y ago
This was a really interesting comment to read that I feel accurately summarizes most of the points being made here. Thanks!

Hokusai 7y ago

> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. ... only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content. This is something important to take into account. I can be a lurker in Hacker News but a top contributor in my towns gardeners forum. Any given person has a maximum time that can dedicate to lurk or contribute. But, one hour of lurking has way more coverage than one hour of contributing. e.g. I can read Reddit, Hacker News, and Wikipedia and still have time left to eat breakfast. But, I want to contribute a new Wikipedia article, probably I will need that complete hour or even more. So, I just contribute to 1 community while lurking in the rest.

LMYahooTFY 7y ago
Really good points. Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk : contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Unless you're a paid online marketer / shillbot, or maybe some sort of journalist / blogger, I suspect this is true for everyone on the intrawebs.
smichel17 7y ago
I had a longer reply that I was going to post, but then it got longer and more nuanced than I wanted to spend the time to type out, so I discarded it instead. I do this quite frequently. This is not directly related to your comment (although the comment I didn't post was), but it's another interesting personal observation to add to the pile.

mitchtbaum 7y ago

https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk

897yh42drj98u0 7y ago

That 1% really flatters themselves if they think of themselves as "creators".

jackcosgrove 7y ago
Oscar Wilde's got you covered. https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html > THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING Reflecting on my internet posting history, sometimes it does seem like a whole lot of nothing. But I still like it.

taxicabjesus 7y ago

We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other people just as good as you. The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special. The 1% of people who contribute to an online community are either people who've gotten to the point that they think they have something to contribute, or they're crapflooders with nothing better to do. Sometimes a few people (say, 1-in-10-million) rise above the ruckus and do something exceptional, or lay the groundwork for a future generation to build upon. In the last two centuries we've had a series of developments by people who laid the foundation for our species to achieve liftoff: James Clerk Maxwell, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Hewlett & Packard, Grace Hopper, William Shockley, and a hundred thousand remarkable/mildly-remarkable others. Hopefully in the next few decades our species can capitalize on the foundations provided by our predecessors, and we can make it into orbit. But most people are "average" or below average. My pseudonym started as my reports of an unremarkable person trying to make observations of average people's struggles. I grew up in a top 10% income household (parents took my sibling and myself on vacations), had a reasonable college fund (which was not well-spent), and didn't appreciate how the other 90% lived until I started driving around in my taxi. Our present engineered shutdown of the economy for a significant percentage of the 90% of people who are no longer needed as farmers should be used as an opportunity to reconsider how things are done for the 99% of people who are just trying their best to get by.

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the__prestige 7y ago

I find that if I am excited about a subject, I tend to participate a lot more (create/edit) than if I am simply consuming. I think there is a 1% rule for /topics/ as well, i.e. I as a user am interested in actively creating/contributing to 1% of all topics I see...

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thedogeye 7y ago

Commenting just to mess with the ratios on this rule.

philips4350 7y ago
count me in too !
- codegladiator 7y ago
  Hardly making a dent here !

WiPo 7y ago

Well, this kind of disproportion would only be worse in traditional media: dozens of writers serving millions of newspaper/magazine readers.

lonelappde 7y ago
Even worse, each article has only 1 writer for all readers!

perilunar 7y ago

1% sounds bad, but compared to pre-internet days it's pretty good. Consider a large city newspaper: probably hundreds of journalists and letter writers, but millions of readers, so much less than 1%.

magicsmoke 7y ago
Also speaks to the nature of influence and power throughout history. Usually it's only around 1% of the human population that can reach and impact the lives of more than a few hundred others (roughly the size of a small village where you can get to know everyone) and expand their influence over countries and empires of millions. Likewise, history only records the details of the lives of far less than 1% of all people that have ever lived. If you were one of the peasant masses, your entire life is summarized by whatever tidbits of trivia historians can glean from the artifacts from the grave of the one lucky person that they happened to find. Same idea, 1% of all the graves that ever existed serve to illustrate the lives of the rest of humanity to future historians. Really gives you a perspective on where an individual's life fits into the grand scheme of things. If you don't make it into the history books, in a 100 years once everyone who ever knew you as a person has passed it'll be as if you never existed at all.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
  Even those people in the history books, it's hard to care about them really beyond caricatured silhouettes of who history portrayed them to be.
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ladzoppelin 7y ago

Things "even out" here, its been like that for years. The top comments are usually smart with added inflammatory BS that only top comments possess. You can actually find really good advice, about many subjects, right after that first block of unstoppable up-votes.

lonelappde 7y ago

This is not a scientific measurement. "1%" is an idiom for "very few". "9%" is a mismathematization of "10%" meaning "few".

nyfresh 7y ago

Long time lurker here.I often feel I have nothing useful to contribute.So I don't. You're welcome.

deleted 7y ago
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aexl 7y ago
I'm as well a long time lurker. Whenever I contribute something, I feel that it should be helpful for many other people out there. This comment probably isn't...
- drbacon 7y ago
  Ha! Well you made this lurker laugh, and reply! Also, it is not uncommon for me to write out a reply and then delete it before submitting because I second guess that the comment has value.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
Another reason why people avoid contributing: unwritten social rules. New members often step on people's toes and suffer the consequences. As a result, joining a new group can be intimidating. Better to lurk for a while and gain understanding of what is and isn't normal.
dredmorbius 7y ago
What I discovered, decades ago, was that posting questions, or even better, answers, even wrong ones (unintentionally) is a phenomenal way to learn things. That still holds true. Though it helps profoundly to not insist on being wrong. Which I try to do. Not always successfully.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  I mostly focus on finding people with the answers. One person here I invited to another place specifically because they asked exceptionally, good questions. Most of the time, their questions led to more good answers or just perspectives. I'd like to see more of that.

knzhou 7y ago

This is extended in the post/article "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" [0]. > The 1% rule is of course just another way of saying that the distribution of contributions follows a Power Law Distribution, which means that the level of inequality gets more drastic as you look at smaller subsets of users. > Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule. > 167,113 of Amazons 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. > YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of videos without watching them. > If you consume any content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways. I don't really know what to do with this observation except to note that it seems like it's worth keeping in mind when using the Internet. Of course, that post's author is clearly insane. With 72k reputation and 1000 posts on Stack Exchange, I'm proudly insane. And if you're about to reply with a witty comment, you might just be insane, too. ;) 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

danschumann 7y ago

You're 1 in 100, poster.

pedalpete 7y ago

How should we take it if we have 60%+ of users creating content, and very few lurkers? Is that a good thing? Or under-optimized?

neoddish 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago

For Google+, by one measure (all registered profiles), the "1%" were actually the 0.16% When considered against all profiles which had posted at least once, which gets around the forced-account dynamic, the comparison of 0.16% vs. 5.09%, is ... approximately π%: 3.1434185% Much closer to the 1% rule, and probably more accurately reflecting actual lurkers, which should bring it even closer in line. https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the... NB: The research above was based on methods I'd developed, and reached results quite similar to my own, though it was done independently and I had no idea it was performed until Eric Enge published it. Communicating just how thin active G+ usership was, to many of those active I=users, proved surprisingly hard. People have little innate grasp of statistics or very large numbers -- 2.2 billion+ profiles at the time. Also, MAU (monthly active users) is a far better measure than regisration counts. Especially for mandatory accounts.

hyperman1 7y ago

Same goes for bugs. 90 pct of your users doesn't even report downtime. A report on something non major is rare. I learned to listen to reported problems carefully, however weird.

koheripbal 7y ago
Depends on the user. Some report every blip in their wifi.
- hyperman1 7y ago
  Funny you say that. We had someone in a remote office complaining of neverending WIFI problems, but never reproducable. None of the coworkers mentioned any problems. All network statistics said everything fine. One day I happen to be in the neighbourhood so let's take a look. Turns out the line was upgraded by the phone company, but the old modem never removed. So there was a new phone line connected to a new modem connected to nothing. Next to it a literally crumbling phone line, an old modem thrown on the ground and buried under a mess of boxes and overheating, connected to their core router. Monitoring was a mess of statistics from the old and new system thrown together, so nobody noticed for over 2 years. Why she was the only complainer at that office, I will never understand. But she stopped complaining that very day.
- cxr 7y ago
  Previously: They Might Never Tell You It's Broken https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427996

dfee 7y ago

I remember the days of early social networking: I.e. pre-mass networking like we have now with FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc. It seemed then that more individuals participated then, than do today (literally, those Sam individuals have fallen off). Anyway, I wonder at what size of “community” this principle takes hold. Certainly, some form of it is true at the scale of modern social media as mentioned above, and it seems the same for the quarterly class updates that come from my college. But at 20 people we seem to have a sort of “small group dynamics” principle take over. And maybe, then the right way to think about this is that as the groups size approaches one, I should be applying this model to groups as a whole (“in a collection of small groups, only 1% flourish, 9% stay stagnant, and 90% are silent”).

zw123456 7y ago

There is also the concept of partial consumption. Often you might click on something you think might be interesting, peruse or preview it, then decide it wasn't as interesting as you thought and move on. Did you actually consume that content or did you preview it? There is no way to know if someone is lurking, actually fully consuming the content or simply previewing it. There is probably no way to prove this but my guess is that 90% of the consumers are actually previewers.

lawry 7y ago

I wonder how having the amount of posts you made (like forums do) influences this number. And subsequently how others on the platform respond (since it's in their best interest to be as kind as possible to new posters to make the community grow?)

qwerty123457 7y ago

This applies to real life as well. I'd replace "lurker" with passive, "contributor" with active, and "creator" with changer.

mrunkel 7y ago

> A 2005 study of radical Jihadist forums found 87% of users had never posted on the forums, 13% had posted at least once, 5% had posted 50 or more times, and only 1% had posted 500 or more times.[5] This struck me as a bit funny. I can imagine the 87% being the NSA, BND and other law enforcement watching the activity on the forum.

summerdown2 7y ago

My prediction: this will be the one post where the 1% rule doesn't apply, as a much larger number will be spurred into action by the topic in question - and end up actually saying something.

kuu 7y ago
It's funny, because in the list of comments, the comment above yours says he's doing exactly that :)

visarga 7y ago

Wikipedia is confusing. Which is it? > The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 99% of the people who view that content. or > 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community , stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk .

bregma 7y ago

Using the term 'lurker' for consumers implies a pretty negative value judgement. If something like Wikipedia is not there to be consumed but only written (and I've long asserted that wikis are write-only media, but Wikipedia coupled with a good online search engine is not a typical wiki), what is the value of the 1%? Contributing to something nobody reads just becomes an act of masturbation.

yamrzou 7y ago

Related discussion: "Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827

ohiovr 7y ago

I estimated that about 1 out of 100 would review and or rate my apps. Except for paid then it was more like 1 out of 25 but that might be an exception.