[Sussex] Jakob Nielsen on Participation Inequality on the Web

[Phil Slade]

from the Alertbox newsletter -

"useit.com -> Alertbox -> Oct. 2006 Participation
Inequality in Social Design 	

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 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.

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 tutorial on what designers can learn from
social psychology at the User Experience 2006
conference in Seattle and London.
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.

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Copyright (c) 2006 by Jakob Nielsen. ISSN 1548-5552 "