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:
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.
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!
FWIW, I'm not logged in on every device. For example generally I'm not logged in on my mobile because I don't like typing on it. On a work computer I'm not logged in either.
One thing I would like to see is #upvotes/story and #comments/story, both over time. Those might say something about the ‘liveliness’ of the community.
I used to submit more years ago, but it got ridiculous to get votes. I suspect there must be a LOT of brigading to get posts out of the /newest cesspool.
Maybe this will echo out into the empty universe, but I thought I would mention a point that I think skews your data and conclusion. My hypothesis is that the reason you are seeing what seems to confirm the stated rule, is that it is the "1%" (edit: it is likely actually some subsection of the 1%) that controls access and creates immense barriers and a hostile environment for participation. I theorize too that the reason you are seeing an even lower (0.8%) creator rate, is that this forum even more than some of the bigger forums, polices and controls access even more than common.
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
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?
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.
That's why I left Quora. I'm a really gullible person, and I was going to respond to somebody who posted something inflammatory, then I realized I had the option to just walk away. So I did.
I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again.
> on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people...
There are also big differences within this 1%. Even among the people who write regularly, there is probably a tiny minority that generates most of the text. Imagine people with no life, spending each day at least 10 hours online, typing without thinking too much, which allows them to post at least one comment each minute... doing this for years. Your comments are mostly lost in this ocean.
I think of that sometimes when writing. I try to avoid, for example, abbreviations: It's shorter for me to write, but it means 99 other people will need to decipher them.
Or not editing my post, things like that, that might save me time, but are multiplied by 99 on the other end.
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.
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.
> 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.
Life is about emotions and regret. If you don't have any emotions or regrets, you haven't lived. I hope people internalize that as well. Also, my top peeve on social media these days are virtue signaling goody-two-shoes. The paternalistic moralizing and talking down to isn't my cup of tea. If people wanted that, they could go read Aesop's Fables.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
> 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.
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”).
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.
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
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:
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.[+] [-] airstrike|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fnoord|6 years ago|reply
Though I don't know how widespread such usage is.
[+] [-] eindiran|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robin_Message|6 years ago|reply
Any way to divide logged in weekly sessions by all weekly sessions, or something like that?
[+] [-] Someone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] W__S|6 years ago|reply
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
[+] [-] dwd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fanf2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperman1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cycloptic|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yingw787|6 years ago|reply
I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again.
[+] [-] Viliam1234|6 years ago|reply
There are also big differences within this 1%. Even among the people who write regularly, there is probably a tiny minority that generates most of the text. Imagine people with no life, spending each day at least 10 hours online, typing without thinking too much, which allows them to post at least one comment each minute... doing this for years. Your comments are mostly lost in this ocean.
[+] [-] keithnz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|6 years ago|reply
I think of that sometimes when writing. I try to avoid, for example, abbreviations: It's shorter for me to write, but it means 99 other people will need to decipher them.
Or not editing my post, things like that, that might save me time, but are multiplied by 99 on the other end.
[+] [-] knzhou|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixpulvis|6 years ago|reply
Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.
[+] [-] EGreg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dntbnmpls|6 years ago|reply
Life is about emotions and regret. If you don't have any emotions or regrets, you haven't lived. I hope people internalize that as well. Also, my top peeve on social media these days are virtue signaling goody-two-shoes. The paternalistic moralizing and talking down to isn't my cup of tea. If people wanted that, they could go read Aesop's Fables.
[+] [-] alok-g|6 years ago|reply
(* Per Github traffic stats.)
[+] [-] Hokusai|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ecdavis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rzzzt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyfresh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
That still holds true. Though it helps profoundly to not insist on being wrong.
Which I try to do. Not always successfully.
[+] [-] aexl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] taxicabjesus|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hyperman1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekchar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perilunar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicsmoke|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Chathamization|6 years ago|reply
- 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...
[+] [-] californical|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedogeye|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philips4350|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamrzou|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
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...
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.
[+] [-] knzhou|6 years ago|reply
> 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...
[+] [-] hrdwdmrbl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrunkel|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dfee|6 years ago|reply
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”).
[+] [-] superfamicom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexdumitru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]