Online participation: Foldesk
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Do you remember the 90–9–1 Rule?
Online participation is the interaction between users and social platforms/communities involving the contribution and provision of content. The psychology of internet users is known as the “90 – 9 – 1 Rule”: out of n people, 1% creates the content, 9% curates it, and the other 90% simply consumes (reads or observes) it.
The phenomenon has been defined as Participation Inequality: a small percentage of users typically provide the majority of the content. This result has been first identified and studied in depth by Will Hill in the early ’90s and it is always been considered a great rule of thumb which underlines that participation in social network/communities is highly skewed and unequal.
Is the Rule still valid after 20 years?
The amount of digital content has been growing exponentially since 2005 (according to KPCB), and a BBC research in 2012 called “The participation Choice” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/bbcinternet/2012/05/bbc_online_briefing_spring_201_1.html ) concludes that the 90–9–1 Rule is outmoded. Their result was indeed that participation is now the rule rather than the exception. However, an article called “Is the 1% rule dead? BBC thinks so but it is wrong” (2012) ( http://gigaom.com/2012/05/06/bbc-1-percent-rule/ ) published by GIGOM dismissed the BBC result and stated that the rule is still more valid than ever. And we agree.
Sharing content or “social sharing” keeps increasing, but the same is not happening for the concept of Contribution. The “90–9–1 Rule” still exists in every social network and community that has ever been studied and is also true for giants like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Wikipedia. We call this phenomenon “suboptimal participation” or “under-contribution”. For this reason the Participation Inequality is still one of the significant rules of social media but it seems that it is not getting enough attention.
Sometimes platforms are not well structured in order to let users contribute. Sometimes users do not feel comfortable at providing content. Technological and psychological barriers are therefore preventing the 90–9–1 Rule from being broken. In the end, the right product has not been built yet. We believe that the Rule is representative of a product which doesn’t allow the user to contribute properly. The 90–9–1 Rule is not in equilibrium and it can be broken.
And Foldesk will overcome it!
