5 ms·

The 90-9-1 principle: 10% of HN users decide on what the other 90% see

56 points by hubraumhugo 5y ago

0xdeadbeefbabe 5y ago
20% of HN posts are unambiguous and don't need any clarifying comments, but 80% of the time comments are helpful: see Pareto distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution. It's fascinating too if not new.
JadoJodo 5y ago
I'm not certain that I understand what the issue is here (if any); The only thing preventing the "lurking" 90% from also affecting what is seen is... their inaction?
- hubraumhugo 5y ago
  Isn't there the danger of an echo chamber if a small number of superusers generates the majority of content?
  - lumost 5y ago
    Isn’t this the definition of an editorial board?
  - JadoJodo 5y ago
    There's nothing special about the "superusers" other than their decision to act. I can think of another parallel: Homeowner's Associations (setting aside my own issues with them for a moment). I would guess that a similarly disproportionate number of homeowners choose to attend HOA meetings, and thus have an outsized effect on the direction and rules of the neighborhood. As a "reward" for not just showing up, but being among the minority to do so, they have a louder voice. This "effort" is analogous to commenting/voting/etc. on HN/social sites. As long as there are nothing that stops the individuals (homeowners, lurkers) from participating, I see no issues with it.
    - emerged 5y ago
      I don’t think anyone thinks they are special, which is why ideally they wouldn’t have such influence. I don’t think practically speaking there is much to be done about it, it’s just an interesting thing to note.
  - mikestew 5y ago
    "Superusers"? There's nothing super-human about going to the New page and clicking a few up arrows, nor is the Submit page significantly onerous.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Some number of them are fighting the echo chamber
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    There is also "weighting" of posts by mods, which dang has mentioned on multiple occasions.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Not a small number? What is it?
- quantified 5y ago
  Follows along with “squeaky wheel gets the grease” and usual small-town-ish politics. Engage and get the benefits. Love to see stats on percentage of users that submit.
netizen-936824 5y ago
That 90% could spend more time upvoting articles in New I wander over there periodically to see if there's interesting stuff. I upvote it when I either think its interesting or think it will generate interesting discussion
dredmorbius 5y ago
The 90-9-1 or 1% principle is well established in virtually any communications network, it's a very rough rule of thumb, and arises as do numerous other phenomena out of power law and Zipf function relations. Jacob Nielsen discussed the concept in 2006, and I recommend it for more background. There's also a good Wikipedia article. Andrew Odlyzko uncharacteristically seems not to have addressed this directly in his own (otherwise excellent) article archive, though I'm sure it's mentioned in passing at least once. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html The "1%" may be far smaller than the rule would lead one to believe. In the case of Google+, it was roughly 0.16% of all profiles who were active within the previous month. On the JoindiasporaCom pod of the Diaspora* network, of some 316,658 registered profiles, 546, or 0.17%. The fact that both networks show similar numbers ... may also suggest a long-term tendency of social media sites. I participated actively in both. 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... https://web.archive.org/web/20220112195336/https://joindiaspora.com/statistics https://web.archive.org/web/20220112195336/https://joindiasp... The implications of the 90-9-1 rule are several, and the Tweet thread here only touches on a few elements. - Yes, a small number of participants can unduly influence what gets shown, though nudging that is a very imprecise practice at best. The "1%" itself however will reflect multiple divergent interests. The Hivemind is vast and contains multitudes. It contradicts itself. - In reverse-engineering possible usage metrics, the 90-9-1 rule offers at least some basis for making estimates and drawing inferences, though these may be off by an order or two of magnitude. - With larger networks, the "1%" tends to become an ever-smaller fraction. - With older networks, participation tends strongly toward attrition. - Activity metrics such as MUA are far more relevant than total registrations. - The impressions drawn from any voluntary-participation exchange are all but certain to be entirely divorced from those determined by systematic random sampling. At best you might be able to state how the most active participants of a group will respond. If that corresponds to other power alignments, it may be useful. Quite often it is not. A tiny minority can make a deafening noise. (The above point was a late add to this comment. I'd meant to include it initially.) - Total users tells you very little about prevalence or impressions --- how often a given item is seen on a site. Counts of things --- profiles, posts, comments, and the like --- are easy to come by. Counts of actions, and especially of who saw what and for how long are much harder to come by, but far more significant measures. Recall that each individual person's time is non-fungible. We all have 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds, in a day, and those are allocated to a set number of tasks. There's a pretty fascinating field of research in time-use studies, how many messages people are presented with, how many words are spoken, books or articles read, etc.,, within a day, week, month, year, decade, or lifetime. And the totals are often far smaller than you might think. Our attention and personal data access and processing bandwidth are very finite. I've just downloaded ten years worth of posts, some 2,700 items, from a social media site that's going offline. The compressed text amounts to just over 18 MB. That's ten years of content, in just under 13 floppy disk's worth of storage (1.4 MB is a truly puny quantity today). Put another way, a 1 TB drive could hold either roughly 60,000 people's data for a comparable period of time, or my own musings for well over a half-million years. (I'll see how much of that I can deliver.) Ten years' writing at a comparable pace from all the world's population would occupy 130 PiB of storage, which would cost roughly $2.5 million. Well within the budget of a modest commercial entity, let alone a state actor. The real services of social media aren't content but in providing audience, discovery, visibility, and interaction. That's the principle benefit I find from HN, better on some days than others. And finally, "ranking" within the most-active queue has very little to say about quality or value. In yesterday's discussion of Donald Knuth's work, drfuchs made a number of highly insightful comments. That's David R. Fuchs, best I can make out. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2363.2367 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2363.2367) Their HN presence is modest. That has virtually no bearing on their history and contributions to the field, however. Many easy-to-acquire metrics provide little if any useful guide to overall quality, fitness, or value. Quantity is not quality. (Though it has a quality all its own, has has been noted.) Edit: see late add above.
monster2control 5y ago
This is essentially how life works. Ever do a group project, volunteer, anything that involves a group of people? It almost always devolves into about 10% of said group doing all the work.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Because people rarely can contribute in equal amounts, unless it's something simple, like walking.
- hubraumhugo 5y ago
  Yes, the Pareto principle is similar and states that 20 percent of a group will produce 80 percent of the activity.
nonameiguess 5y ago
I think this is the point. A television show should have at least 9 times as many viewers as cast and crew. A newspaper has far more readers than it has editors and writers. If anything, modern "everyone is a content creator" platforms have already brought this too far even letting 1% of people create the content. On the one hand, this sort of democratization means you can find diamonds in the rough who'd have never had a chance otherwise, avoiding the whole "how many Einstein's died at age 8 while toiling for a family farm" problem. On the other hand, you get a combinatorial explosion of trash content not worth reading. For every Einstein, you get 999 George McCready Prices. I hope this doesn't come off too elitist, but it relates to the other front page item right now about the guy who doesn't have a blog. Everyone in there is giving reasons he should go ahead and publish a blog. Well, what happens if every single person on the planet publishes a blog? How are you supposed to find the ones worth reading? Someone else mentioned HOAs. What is the point if your HOA board is just every person in the neighborhood? If you completely decentralize literally everything, we lose all of the economies of scale that come along with specialization and division of labor and suddenly everyone needs to be a writer and an editor in addition to everything else they already do.
antisthenes 5y ago
This is not a problem, because there are other communities where the 10% of active HN users are indeed just lurkers, and another 10% are the active group. We simply don't have the time to be active in everything that is interesting to us at all times. But hey, when you're pandering to your twitter following, I guess you gotta grasp at weird straws like this to generate "content". Yikes.
el_don_almighty 5y ago
I know for sure 90% of you are smarter than me, so please... continue with the regularly scheduled programming
ineedasername 5y ago
The title seems click-bait(ish). There's no data here specific to HN to demonstrate that this general observation applies on HN as well. There are also levels of engagement: A person who never comments might not creat content, but their upvotes would still influence what people see yet it seems those folks would be counted outside of the 10%. It would be really interesting to see stats on unique user view to HN vs Unique posters and commenters, I suspect HN might violate to 10% rule, but without that for the headline to make that claim one way or another is just silly
metalised 5y ago
Sadly, I realised this too, when nobody listened to my cry for help here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 Any chance someone can help me still?
tpoacher 5y ago
I think this is probably reversed in the caae of HN. To me it feels like 10% of people write posts, but it's the 1% that checks and votes on 'fresh' which decide what the remaining 90% see. And this is before any moderation takes place (shadowbans, rate limiting, visibility limiting, etc)

56 points by hubraumhugo 5y ago

20% of HN posts are unambiguous and don't need any clarifying comments, but 80% of the time comments are helpful: see Pareto distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution. It's fascinating too if not new.

JadoJodo 5y ago

I'm not certain that I understand what the issue is here (if any); The only thing preventing the "lurking" 90% from also affecting what is seen is... their inaction?

hubraumhugo 5y ago
Isn't there the danger of an echo chamber if a small number of superusers generates the majority of content?
- lumost 5y ago
  Isn’t this the definition of an editorial board?
- JadoJodo 5y ago
  There's nothing special about the "superusers" other than their decision to act. I can think of another parallel: Homeowner's Associations (setting aside my own issues with them for a moment). I would guess that a similarly disproportionate number of homeowners choose to attend HOA meetings, and thus have an outsized effect on the direction and rules of the neighborhood. As a "reward" for not just showing up, but being among the minority to do so, they have a louder voice. This "effort" is analogous to commenting/voting/etc. on HN/social sites. As long as there are nothing that stops the individuals (homeowners, lurkers) from participating, I see no issues with it.
  - emerged 5y ago
    I don’t think anyone thinks they are special, which is why ideally they wouldn’t have such influence. I don’t think practically speaking there is much to be done about it, it’s just an interesting thing to note.
- mikestew 5y ago
  "Superusers"? There's nothing super-human about going to the New page and clicking a few up arrows, nor is the Submit page significantly onerous.
- verdverm 5y ago
  Some number of them are fighting the echo chamber
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  There is also "weighting" of posts by mods, which dang has mentioned on multiple occasions.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Not a small number? What is it?
quantified 5y ago
Follows along with “squeaky wheel gets the grease” and usual small-town-ish politics. Engage and get the benefits. Love to see stats on percentage of users that submit.

netizen-936824 5y ago

That 90% could spend more time upvoting articles in New I wander over there periodically to see if there's interesting stuff. I upvote it when I either think its interesting or think it will generate interesting discussion

dredmorbius 5y ago

The 90-9-1 or 1% principle is well established in virtually any communications network, it's a very rough rule of thumb, and arises as do numerous other phenomena out of power law and Zipf function relations. Jacob Nielsen discussed the concept in 2006, and I recommend it for more background. There's also a good Wikipedia article. Andrew Odlyzko uncharacteristically seems not to have addressed this directly in his own (otherwise excellent) article archive, though I'm sure it's mentioned in passing at least once. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html The "1%" may be far smaller than the rule would lead one to believe. In the case of Google+, it was roughly 0.16% of all profiles who were active within the previous month. On the JoindiasporaCom pod of the Diaspora* network, of some 316,658 registered profiles, 546, or 0.17%. The fact that both networks show similar numbers ... may also suggest a long-term tendency of social media sites. I participated actively in both. 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... https://web.archive.org/web/20220112195336/https://joindiaspora.com/statistics https://web.archive.org/web/20220112195336/https://joindiasp... The implications of the 90-9-1 rule are several, and the Tweet thread here only touches on a few elements. - Yes, a small number of participants can unduly influence what gets shown, though nudging that is a very imprecise practice at best. The "1%" itself however will reflect multiple divergent interests. The Hivemind is vast and contains multitudes. It contradicts itself. - In reverse-engineering possible usage metrics, the 90-9-1 rule offers at least some basis for making estimates and drawing inferences, though these may be off by an order or two of magnitude. - With larger networks, the "1%" tends to become an ever-smaller fraction. - With older networks, participation tends strongly toward attrition. - Activity metrics such as MUA are far more relevant than total registrations. - The impressions drawn from any voluntary-participation exchange are all but certain to be entirely divorced from those determined by systematic random sampling. At best you might be able to state how the most active participants of a group will respond. If that corresponds to other power alignments, it may be useful. Quite often it is not. A tiny minority can make a deafening noise. (The above point was a late add to this comment. I'd meant to include it initially.) - Total users tells you very little about prevalence or impressions --- how often a given item is seen on a site. Counts of things --- profiles, posts, comments, and the like --- are easy to come by. Counts of actions, and especially of who saw what and for how long are much harder to come by, but far more significant measures. Recall that each individual person's time is non-fungible. We all have 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds, in a day, and those are allocated to a set number of tasks. There's a pretty fascinating field of research in time-use studies, how many messages people are presented with, how many words are spoken, books or articles read, etc.,, within a day, week, month, year, decade, or lifetime. And the totals are often far smaller than you might think. Our attention and personal data access and processing bandwidth are very finite. I've just downloaded ten years worth of posts, some 2,700 items, from a social media site that's going offline. The compressed text amounts to just over 18 MB. That's ten years of content, in just under 13 floppy disk's worth of storage (1.4 MB is a truly puny quantity today). Put another way, a 1 TB drive could hold either roughly 60,000 people's data for a comparable period of time, or my own musings for well over a half-million years. (I'll see how much of that I can deliver.) Ten years' writing at a comparable pace from all the world's population would occupy 130 PiB of storage, which would cost roughly $2.5 million. Well within the budget of a modest commercial entity, let alone a state actor. The real services of social media aren't content but in providing audience, discovery, visibility, and interaction. That's the principle benefit I find from HN, better on some days than others. And finally, "ranking" within the most-active queue has very little to say about quality or value. In yesterday's discussion of Donald Knuth's work, drfuchs made a number of highly insightful comments. That's David R. Fuchs, best I can make out. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2363.2367 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2363.2367) Their HN presence is modest. That has virtually no bearing on their history and contributions to the field, however. Many easy-to-acquire metrics provide little if any useful guide to overall quality, fitness, or value. Quantity is not quality. (Though it has a quality all its own, has has been noted.) Edit: see late add above.

monster2control 5y ago

This is essentially how life works. Ever do a group project, volunteer, anything that involves a group of people? It almost always devolves into about 10% of said group doing all the work.

peakaboo 5y ago
Because people rarely can contribute in equal amounts, unless it's something simple, like walking.
hubraumhugo 5y ago
Yes, the Pareto principle is similar and states that 20 percent of a group will produce 80 percent of the activity.

nonameiguess 5y ago

I think this is the point. A television show should have at least 9 times as many viewers as cast and crew. A newspaper has far more readers than it has editors and writers. If anything, modern "everyone is a content creator" platforms have already brought this too far even letting 1% of people create the content. On the one hand, this sort of democratization means you can find diamonds in the rough who'd have never had a chance otherwise, avoiding the whole "how many Einstein's died at age 8 while toiling for a family farm" problem. On the other hand, you get a combinatorial explosion of trash content not worth reading. For every Einstein, you get 999 George McCready Prices. I hope this doesn't come off too elitist, but it relates to the other front page item right now about the guy who doesn't have a blog. Everyone in there is giving reasons he should go ahead and publish a blog. Well, what happens if every single person on the planet publishes a blog? How are you supposed to find the ones worth reading? Someone else mentioned HOAs. What is the point if your HOA board is just every person in the neighborhood? If you completely decentralize literally everything, we lose all of the economies of scale that come along with specialization and division of labor and suddenly everyone needs to be a writer and an editor in addition to everything else they already do.

antisthenes 5y ago

This is not a problem, because there are other communities where the 10% of active HN users are indeed just lurkers, and another 10% are the active group. We simply don't have the time to be active in everything that is interesting to us at all times. But hey, when you're pandering to your twitter following, I guess you gotta grasp at weird straws like this to generate "content". Yikes.

el_don_almighty 5y ago

I know for sure 90% of you are smarter than me, so please... continue with the regularly scheduled programming

ineedasername 5y ago

The title seems click-bait(ish). There's no data here specific to HN to demonstrate that this general observation applies on HN as well. There are also levels of engagement: A person who never comments might not creat content, but their upvotes would still influence what people see yet it seems those folks would be counted outside of the 10%. It would be really interesting to see stats on unique user view to HN vs Unique posters and commenters, I suspect HN might violate to 10% rule, but without that for the headline to make that claim one way or another is just silly

metalised 5y ago

Sadly, I realised this too, when nobody listened to my cry for help here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423 Any chance someone can help me still?

tpoacher 5y ago

I think this is probably reversed in the caae of HN. To me it feels like 10% of people write posts, but it's the 1% that checks and votes on 'fresh' which decide what the remaining 90% see. And this is before any moderation takes place (shadowbans, rate limiting, visibility limiting, etc)