Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute Posted October 17th, 2006 in Forum News, Management, General, Guest Contributors

In an article at useit.com, Jakob Nielsen looks at lurkers vs. active contributing members in a forum or community.

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.

Nielsen gives some examples of participation inequality in social networks, review sites, blogs, etc. But he gives some good ideas for how to overcome, or at least reduce, participation inequality:

• 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.

Out of this list, my favorite is “Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants.” There are so many things we can do for our users as forum owners. From reputation systems, to “kudos” like I use at dreamincode.net, to free giveaways. Even things as simple as member badges or titles can encourage users to contribute and participate.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com