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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.