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1% rule

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Re: 1% rule

#61
post #30

> 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 contri…

Really good points.

Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk : contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.

Re: 1% rule

#63

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%.

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.

Re: 1% rule

#64
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 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.

> 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...

Re: 1% rule

#66

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…

This thinking actually causes me to post more, and get into more flamewars, because it bothers me when something obviously wrong is going to be seen by hundreds of people.

Re: 1% rule

#68

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.

It's pretty easy. Doing anything is a skill that you can hone by repeating it. There are lots of people who haven't posted anything and they are inexperienced at posting comments. Once you have posted a few hundred comments you've become comfortable with posting regularly. Then it suddenly becomes obvious that you cannot be super skilled at everything. Maybe you are a frequent HN user but not someone who answers questions on Stackoverflow.

Re: 1% rule

#69
post #23

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 facto…

Given the demographics, is the 0.8% likely due to HN posters/readers being more at the introverted end of spectrum so slightly less inclined to engage?

Re: 1% rule

#70

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…

Just because 99% of people lurk doesn’t mean they will see YOUR contribution. I mean, the popularity of authors or posts is not uniform either.
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