Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Ni...

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.

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.

"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: "

Nielsen's take on the Horowitz classification.