Ask HN: A User's First Post?

I've been an active HN reader for a while now. This whole time I've been sitting on the sidelines contributing nothing to the discussion; I only recently created a profile.

I'd imagine there's a lot of HN readers like me. It's the classic "free rider" problem. So today I've decided to start adding to the discussion. But is it just me or is your first HN post/comment a little intimidating?

Anyway, considering the bigger picture, there are a lot of other community-based sites (e.g. Yelp, Wikipedia, etc.) that have the same free rider problem. I'm curious if there's any data out there on the percentage of members that actually contribute to these sites in the form of comments, postings, reviews, etc. And also, have you seen these sites do anything to actively encourage someone to leave their first post? I'd imagine that's the biggest barrier.

On one email list I moderate, I tell all participants in an automated welcome message that they are encouraged to introduce themselves to the list, and that once they have, they will be taken off the moderation of submitted messages that is the default on that list. Over time (four years), about a third of the subscribers have posted, as I can tell from how many users are no longer on moderation. There are almost 500 subscribers on that list, all sharing a membership in a state organization of which I am president.

I think that's a great idea. And 33% is a hell of a lot more than 1%. I think basically you found a clever way to convince a lof the people that Feld would say are "on the fence" to become active users by breaking down the biggest barrier, the first post.

I never felt any barrier to posting on HN. Nearly everyone on this site is pretty welcoming. Just comment on something that interests you, or that you know something about.

By the way, for me, and I suspect many others, it's not really a free rider problem like you describe. I don't gain much by simply having a collection of interesting links, nor do I feel like I'm doing a service when I post a comment or article. I gain from the actual discussions around interesting articles, especially when people respond to my comments.

Yes, posting and commenting here is intimidating at first. The combination of very smart people + strong opinions + all the web rockstars who hang out here gives one pause when commenting. I first wandered over to HN about six months ago from Reddit (and Digg, sad to say). For the first few weeks, the ratio of comments I wrote to comments I posted was about 2:1, because I was afraid of putting my foot in my mouth. Perhaps that's just me, though.