The latest issue of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox concludes that user participation usually breaks down to the 90-9-1 rule. 90 percent are lurkers. 9 percent contribute infrequently. And just 1 percent participate frequently, which ends up accounting for most contributions. (You may remember all the recent hubbub at Digg over the same issues. And our personal experience here at Lost Remote confirms those general ratios.) So how do you overcome the participation inequality? “You can’t,” Nielsen says, but there are ways to encourage more participation overall by making participation a side effect, rewarding participants and promoting quality contributors, to name a few. “Your website’s design undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse,” he writes.
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