# Forum participation



## Andrew_K99 (Aug 4, 2011)

This was posted in a members blog on another forum I am a member of, the member is the forum administrator.  I thought it was very interesting and thought you may too.  *Answer the poll after reading*, it may be interesting to see the results (though if you just lurk you probably won't vote so the results may be flawed.)

*Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 9, 2006:*
*Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute*
*Summary:* 
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. ​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't participate* very much. Often, they simply *lurk* in the background. 
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 '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research (see references below). 



 
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. 


User participation often more or less follows a *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 time*, but 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.
*Early Inequality Research*

Before 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. 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. Conversely, the most active 3% of posters contributed 25% of the messages. 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. 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. 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. And you would never hear from the silent majority of lurkers. 
*Inequality on the Web*

There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet *only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs* according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, *only 0.1% of users post daily*. *Blogs have even worse participation inequality* than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1. 
Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers. 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. alone. 
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. 
Participation inequality exists in many places on the Web. A quick glance at Amazon.com, 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*. 
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. 
*Downsides of Participation Inequality*



 


Participation inequality is not necessarily unfair because "some users are more equal than others" to misquote Animal Farm. If lurkers want to contribute, they are usually allowed to do so. The problem is that the overall system is *not representative* of average Web users. 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. This can cause trouble for several reasons: 

*Customer feedback.* If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you're getting an unrepresentative sample.
*Reviews.* 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.
*Politics.* 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. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
*Search.* Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what's useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.
*Signal-to-noise ratio.* Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don't have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.
*Skewed Lurker–Contibutor Ratio for Non-Profit Social Network*

(Update 2009) The "Causes" application on Facebook had *25 million users* in April 2009, but only *185,000 had given a donation*, even though the application offers the ability to give to 179,000 different non-profit organizations. (This according to the Washington Post.) Thus, social networking for charity fundraising has a *99.3% lurkers and 0.7% contributors* rule — even more skewed than the other participation inequalities we have seen. The data doesn't say how many of the 0.7% of users who donated have been _frequent_ contributors, but most likely it's less than 1/10, meaning that the full rule would look something like *99-1-0*. 


This finding comes as no big surprise, for three reasons: 

Despite the hype, Facebook is just another form of collaborative environment, meaning that long-established laws for online communities should hold. Maybe with small modifications, but the basics are due to human nature and don't change when moving to a new platform.
Donating money is a stronger form of action than simply writing user-contributed content, so it makes sense that this form of contribution would have extremely strong participation inequality. If we measured the amount of money donated and not just a binary give/not-give distinction, the skew would likely be even more extreme.
Our research on the user experience of donating to charities online found that most non-profits don't provide the information users want before they're willing to be separated from their money. (Or the info isn't shown in a sufficiently Web-oriented manner.)
*How to Overcome Participation Inequality*

*You can't.* The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It's existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied. 
Your only real choice here is in how you shape the inequality curve's angle. Are you going to have the "usual" 90-9-1 distribution, or the more radical 99-1-0.1 distribution common in some social websites? Can you achieve a more equitable distribution of, say, 80-16-4? (That is, only 80% lurkers, with 16% contributing some and 4% contributing the most.) 


Although participation will always be somewhat unequal, there are ways to better equalize it, including: 

*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.
Your website's design undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse. Being aware of the problem is the first step to alleviating it, and finding ways to broaden participation will become even more important as the Web's social networking services continue to grow. *Learn More*

Full-day course on Integrating Social Features on Mainstream Websites, with usability guidelines for user-generated content, social media, collaboration, and more at the annual Usability Week conference. Research on intranet social features ("enterprise 2.0"). 
*References*

Laurence Brothers, Jim Hollan, Jakob Nielsen, Scott Stornetta, Steve Abney, George Furnas, and Michael Littman (1992): "Supporting informal communication via ephemeral interest groups," Proceedings of CSCW 92, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Toronto, Ontario, November 1-4, 1992), pp. 84-90. William C. Hill, James D. Hollan, Dave Wroblewski, and Tim McCandless (1992): "Edit wear and read wear," Proceedings of CHI'92, the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, CA, May 3-7, 1992), pp. 3-9. 
Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, and Lynn Cherny (1998): "The dynamics of mass interaction," Proceedings of CSCW 98, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Seattle, WA, November 14-18, 1998), pp. 257-264.


So where do you fall in?

AK


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## seamus7227 (Aug 4, 2011)

thanks for sharing this Andrew! I hope others will participate in this


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## MarkD (Aug 4, 2011)

I am trying to read the post but other priorities keep distracting me :biggrin:


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## glycerine (Aug 4, 2011)

I think this sounds about right considering how many "members" we have here.
But the part about "How to Overcome Participation Inequality"- I think if a forum required a paid membership, you could definitly overcome that, or at least change it quite a bit.  But I figure this research is among "free" participation groups...


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## Monty (Aug 4, 2011)

I don't see where it takes into account that a lot of members will not post if the question asked has already been answered. What's the value in "I agree with Joe's post". Also, some people don't see any value in replying "great looking pen", other than padding their post count.


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## Andrew_K99 (Aug 4, 2011)

Monty said:


> I don't see where it takes into account that a lot of members will not post if the question asked has already been answered. What's the value in "I agree with Joe's post". Also, some people don't see any value in replying "great looking pen", other than padding their post count.


Those points may be the difference between a Heavy and Intermittent contributer?


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## NewLondon88 (Aug 4, 2011)

glycerine said:


> I think this sounds about right considering how many "members" we have here.



Although this article is about forum participation, the numbers aren't
much different out in the real world. Go to (or watch on cable) your
local town meetings for a few months and you'll see the same thing.



glycerine said:


> But the part about "How to Overcome Participation Inequality"- I think if a forum required a paid membership, you could definitly overcome that, or at least change it quite a bit.  But I figure this research is among "free" participation groups...



I don't notice much of a difference in paid forums, but to take a free
forum and start charging for it, you'd only skew the numbers without
making a difference in the content.

Think about it .. if you got rid of the bottom 90%, the postings in the
forum wouldn't change at all .. but your percentages would. Would
anybody really want that?

I found it interesting that the author seems to feel that everyone should
be participating more. Yet with only that small core being vocal, we are
already inundated with crap. Would you like to see 900% more crap?
Search engines are almost unusable now (as compared to 10 years ago)
and you have to jump through some hoops to get the search engine to
actually search for what you typed in (as compared to what they think
you really meant) Can you imagine bumping the content by 900%?


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## maxwell_smart007 (Aug 4, 2011)

Intriguingly, the early results indicate that the data is possibly flawed...or that the lurkers don't click on polls either!


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## alphageek (Aug 4, 2011)

maxwell_smart007 said:


> Intriguingly, the early results indicate that the data is possibly flawed...or that the lurkers don't click on polls either!



:biggrin::biggrin::biggrin:  I was wonder how a poll of lurkers was going to work!


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## steeler fan1 (Aug 4, 2011)

Monty said:


> I don't see where it takes into account that a lot of members will not post if the question asked has already been answered. What's the value in "I agree with Joe's post". Also, some people don't see any value in replying "great looking pen", other than padding their post count.


 

I agree with Mannie. I see no reason to post just to add "me too", although I've just done that:rotfl:. I feel if I have something to add great, otherwise keep quiet. Some people are hesitant to reply for fear of answering incorrectly or sounding stupid. 

Carl   (reference tag line)


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## penhead (Aug 4, 2011)

While I can't say I totally disagree with what he said, I would say that (IMHO) you can use numerical analysis to mean just about anything you want it to...and then after all that great information, am I correct in the assumption that at the end of the article is really just trying to sell you on a full day class on how to generate content on social media..??


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## EricJS (Aug 4, 2011)

maxwell_smart007 said:


> Intriguingly, the early results indicate that the data is possibly flawed...*or that the lurkers don't click on polls either!*



I was just about to make that comment.

I am certain that most of our readers are non-members; unable to vote.:wink: But that could have been factored in.


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## TylerRiddle (Aug 4, 2011)

I voted lurker for myself.  I've been a member for a decent amount of time now, but I rarely have questions to ask and when I do, it is usually aimed at a specific person and I just use private messages for that.  I check the forums daily, mainly the classifieds to see if there is anything out there that I want to purchase.  Other than that, usually when I see a question asked that I have an answer to, it's usually already been answered...I don't spend much time posting pics of my pens as I have a website for that, and I'm sure by now everyone has seen a Jr. Statesman in Amboyna Burl with a nice CA finish.  So, to sum it all up, I'm a lurker, but not really by choice, it just works out that way =/


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## ed4copies (Aug 4, 2011)

steeler fan1 said:


> Monty said:
> 
> 
> > I don't see where it takes into account that a lot of members will not post if the question asked has already been answered. What's the value in "I agree with Joe's post". Also, some people don't see any value in replying "great looking pen", other than padding their post count.
> ...



When people post, particularly when they post pens, they are hoping to  have someone notice the pen.  With 200+ views and 3 comments, some will  surmise the rest of the viewers were "unimpressed".  So, a simple post  to the thread makes the OP feel his pen merited comment.

From time to time you will read "I posted my pen and only THREE PEOPLE  commented, I must not be 'in the in-crowd'".  Actually, you will find if  you comment on others' pens, you will get more comments if and when YOU  post one.

So, while there is no NEED to comment, the OP did NOT post the pen because he had nothing to do, he WAS HOPING for COMMENTS!!

Years ago, some people even sent me PM's thanking me for my comments---but that has NOT happened recently---

FWIW:biggrin::biggrin:


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## glycerine (Aug 4, 2011)

NewLondon88 said:


> glycerine said:
> 
> 
> > But the part about "How to Overcome Participation Inequality"- I think if a forum required a paid membership, you could definitly overcome that, or at least change it quite a bit. But I figure this research is among "free" participation groups...
> ...


 
I just mean participation, not content. If you started from scratch with a paid membership group, I wouldn't expect to see too many people pay the membership fee and NOT participate. Or even if you took a current forum, like the IAP and started charging a membership fee, I think all of the lurkers would mosey on over to another forum and no longer "not participate"... 

So instead of saying that 1% are heavy contributors, 9% are moderate and 90% are lurkers, then like you said, you may get rid of the bottom 90%, changing the numbers to be maybe 10% heavy, 88% moderate and 2% lurkers.


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## Andrew_K99 (Aug 4, 2011)

ed4copies said:


> When people post, particularly when they post pens, they are hoping to have someone notice the pen. With 200+ views and 3 comments, some will surmise the rest of the viewers were "unimpressed". So, a simple post to the thread makes the OP feel his pen merited comment.
> 
> From time to time you will read "I posted my pen and only THREE PEOPLE commented, I must not be 'in the in-crowd'". Actually, you will find if you comment on others' pens, you will get more comments if and when YOU post one.
> 
> ...


 I guess this is why there were so few comments on a few pens I posted.

I generally just look and don't often comment on pens unless they are above and beyond.  Guess I better start!

AK


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## mredburn (Aug 4, 2011)

I have found that there is roughly a 2% reply to views ratio on the SOYP forum while the posting is fresh. I belong to another forum where they have a simple button on the bottom of the post that you can click that says "thankyou." It allows you to thank the poster for the information without having generated another post in the thread. This keeps the threads shorter over all. Such a button for us that said "NPGJ"
That posted how many times it was clicked in the original post would leave that warm and fuzzy feeling without having everbody have to type it. It wouldnt boost your own post count but hey some of you talk to much.


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## Displaced Canadian (Aug 4, 2011)

I'm on the light side of moderate. The OP is true, I have been in staff meetings where we broke into discussion groups and of the 15 people in the group 3 of them won't shut up and 4 of them don't say a word, and the rest only will answer a direct question. When the higher-ups ask for your conclusions one of the first 3 will stand up and say,"WE think that...." not realizing that the 4 that won't talk and 5 of the ones that only would answer a direct question think that the first three are are just a little south of clinically insane.
 As for how this relates to the IAP, I think that as long as you understand that the numbers are skewed it's fine after all you can make 80% of statistics say whatever you want 50% of the time. example 30% of accidents are caused by people on cell phones that means that 70% are caused by people not using one therefore it is safer to drive while talking.( disclaimer, I don't know the exact stats)
 As far as comments on pens, they always look better in person. I posted a pen, had a lot of views, few comments but if I pull it out to use it in a public place it gets passed around and perfect strangers ask to see it and it will take several minutes for me to get it back. I no longer have that pen, somebody liked it more than me. It is nice to get comments, I think it is very important for new members to hear them because it can help them improve.


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## John Pratt (Aug 4, 2011)

What is a contributer? Is it someone who posts something that is beneficial or helpful to the other members. Something like words of advice, "what I would do is...", or answering questions for other users? or is it just someone posting "me too"? There is a wealth of knowledge from many of the people on here and I would bet that those people most versed in pen turning are the largest posters. Mere mortals such as myself who are new to the forum, probably don't post as much because we are still learning and just trying to soak up the knowledge of the people who know what they are talking about. At the same time it may take new members a while to feel comfortable posting without feeling intimidated by some of the work posted by others. That may not apply to everyone, but it may be a factor. I bet there is a direct correlation between the skill level of the member and the number of posts they have. Another statistic would be the length of time people have been members and the percentage of posts weekly by those groups (i.e. 6-7 yr members, 4-5 yr members, 2-3 yr members, and newbies vs. the percentage of posts weekly).


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## ed4copies (Aug 4, 2011)

Well, if you separate the members by "join date", the first 15 pages (roughly 300 names) will yield fewer than 10 names, including Jeff and Scott (founders of IAP) who are still on the IAP from time to time.

For the most part, in about two years you have seen every question once or more.  So, you are not likely to learn a lot from day to day.  BUT, you can (hopefully) answer questions with some degree of knowledge--even if it is knowledge gained from READING the IAP.  (I know much of what I personally say is "parroted back" from reading IAP for the past several years).

But, that does become boring.  So, most members will only stay on the site for a couple years.  Don't know if this is good or bad, but it is true.

FWIW!


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## Jgrden (Aug 4, 2011)

Monty said:


> I don't see where it takes into account that a lot of members will not post if the question asked has already been answered. What's the value in "I agree with Joe's post". Also, some people don't see any value in replying "great looking pen", other than padding their post count.


"padding their post count" is why I stopped announcing milestones of those who are active posters and those newbies who need to be encouraged to post. Someone named Bryce or Bruce criticized me for useless and wasteful posting. So I quit, and maybe he was right. So if there are 'newbie lurkers' :ghost: out there, they will stay there with no encouragement to post. :frown:


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## ed4copies (Aug 4, 2011)

John,
One thing I have learned about the IAP.  It doesn't matter WHAT you do, there will be a few folks who tell you not to do it!!

Once in a GREAT while, you will get a PM from someone who really ENJOYS watching what you are doing.

So, focus on the positive and do what YOU think is best.  We all, ultimately, only have to answer for our own actions and that accounting is NOT done here. 

Sometimes being a little hard of hearing can be helpful.


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## NewLondon88 (Aug 5, 2011)

Jgrden said:


> "padding their post count" is why I stopped announcing milestones of those who are active posters and those newbies who need to be encouraged to post. Someone named Bryce or Bruce criticized me for useless and wasteful posting. So I quit, and maybe he was right. So if there are 'newbie lurkers' :ghost: out there, they will stay there with no encouragement to post. :frown:



John .. some people just need more bran in their diet. Do what you feel
until you hear from a moderator. Besides.. it isn't like St. Peter needs two
forms of ID and your post count when you get there.
(assuming you get there :tongue: )


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## Smitty37 (Aug 5, 2011)

*Hmmmmm*

Interesting - here is the thing though

In the 3 (other than classified ads) forums that I frequent often I am a heavy contributor.  In all of the other forums I would call myself a lurker or occasional contributor.

I follow pen turning, marketing and shows and casual conversation closely.  I look at show your pens fairly often but almost never contribute, I occasionaly see an item I want to check on other forums but rarely post.

My total number of posts is high, but they are concentrated in few forums.


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## magpens (Mar 17, 2021)

I am not quite sure how I discovered the existence of this thread. . But .....

I am making this post because the topic of this thread is interesting to me :- thread contributors compared to membership are relatively few.

There seem to have been no contributing posts to this thread since Aug 5, 2011, but I could be reading things wrongly.

I would have expected that a thread this ancient would have, by now, become a thread with multiple pages, but I see only 1 page here.
However, it could be that the multiple pages, beyond this Page 1, have been deleted to conserve memory usage.
Of course, this thread starts off as a polling thread, and maybe that fact may have something to do with the observations I have made.

So I am also posting to do a bit of research ... namely ... to find out if even an ancient thread like this can be revived and reappear in "What's New".

Also, I am encouraging "lurkers" to become more active contributors, because I believe that everybody has something to contribute.
Not that you should feel compelled to write something every week, or even every month.

But please be assured that someone among our membership would love to hear something from you about your interests or what you're doing.
Just a thought, or a reaction to what someone else has posted would also be valued. .


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## Curly (Mar 17, 2021)

Mal a fresh poll might be in order to see if there has been a change in participation or if it remains the same. Resurrecting the dead won't show if there is a change. I voted in the first so can't vote now but new voters would skew (pen turning pun?) the old results.


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## magpens (Mar 17, 2021)

You're right, Pete.

I was not intending this to begin a new poll. .  One would have to start "from scratch" all over again for such a poll to have any real meaning today.

I was just intrigued by a 10-year-old thread coming to my attention, especially when one thought on my mind was the subject of that thread and thinking about membership participation in our daily banter at the PRESENT time.

( ..... yeah ..... one thought ..... I can very rarely handle more than one at a time !!!!! )

One thing I have learned already by "reviving" this thread is that the "revival" does not last for long. . Yes, this thread was "revived" to the  point that it did make an appearance in the " What's New " column here for a bit more than a few minutes, but it did not stay for long. . I think the "residency timing" must be controlled, in part , by the starting date of the thread ...... perhaps barely long enough for  you to catch a glimpse of it and type a response, but not much longer than that. . Interesting. . I have often wondered about the "effective lifetime" of threads. . BTW ..... yours was the only response so far.
However, after this additional "revival" there might now be another response !

Oh, ..... and another BTW !! . . The last to post before my "revival" was Smitty.

We all remember Smitty with considerable fondness.

I hope that the "revival" of this thread, including in particular Smitty's contribution to it, does not portend anything foreboding ... . . .  .  .  .  .  .    .    .


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## jttheclockman (Mar 17, 2021)

Not sure what you are looking for but whats new will last as long as there is new posts to it. Then it moves down to the tier where it is by page and by date or sometimes time. After you get done with whats new you have the threads that say there have been threads that have not been updated since your last visit. They keep moving down as more threads keep getting no new posts to them. All forums are that way. Not sure how many pages are allowed on this site but there are 14 pages that takes you back to Feb15 2021. Jeff probably could answer the technical things.


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