“The 1% Rule”:http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html goes like this:
It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
See also Nick Carr’s post about “Digg statistics”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/few_to_many.php which roughly illustrates what the 1% rule predicts. Maybe it has something to do with Power law, or simply the cognitive load it takes to post or suggest something to a community site, over and above linking to it, is too great an effort for most people. This is presumably why we are seeing a preponderance of _digg/delicious/etc. this_ buttons on blogs and content driven sites; it’s to mitigate readers’ natural laziness (myself included).
Which reminds me of a brilliant addage I read somewhere a long time ago on Slashdot: The content and direction of a self-policing web community is driven proportionally by users who have the most time to commit to it. In other words, those with the most time to waste eventually determine the tone and content of the community simply by consequence of attrition.
