In reply to my first musing, member Don Fry wrote:
A related comment is one you sometimes hear when the winners of one of our prize drawings is announced, and I'm paraphrasing here:
What's interesting is that online communities experience what's known as participation inequality. Research shows that in most communities, 90% of visitors are lurkers who never post a message, 9% of visitors post occasionally, and 1% of visitors account for almost all of the posts.
On a really big site like Wikipedia, 99% of visitors are consumers of information, but just 0.2% of the 32 million unique US visitors actually contribute to the content of Wikipedia.
Of course, there are downsides to participation inequality, and you can read about them in the first link above. But at the end of the day, the experts tell us that there are few things anyone can do to move these percentages. To a certain extent, there's comfort in knowing that what you experience on a forum like TVWBB is not unusual--that this phenomenon is common to most mature communities.
Why do people lurk? This Wikipedia article discusses some of the reasons. At the end of the day, we have to remember that lurkers are the majority. They're the ones reading most of the posts. We should not be surprised when someone from the majority wins a prize drawing. We should offer a friendly, welcoming environment in the hopes of converting lurkers into posters. And I will continue to do what I can, like making some prizes available only to posters, to encourage people to register and post messages, as in the recent Q&A sessions with Kevin Kolman and Famous Dave Anderson.
So what do you think? Why do you lurk at some forums and not others? What motivates you to post? What do you think can be done to convert lurkers into posters? Or should we even be worried about that?
A related comment is one you sometimes hear when the winners of one of our prize drawings is announced, and I'm paraphrasing here:
What's interesting is that online communities experience what's known as participation inequality. Research shows that in most communities, 90% of visitors are lurkers who never post a message, 9% of visitors post occasionally, and 1% of visitors account for almost all of the posts.
On a really big site like Wikipedia, 99% of visitors are consumers of information, but just 0.2% of the 32 million unique US visitors actually contribute to the content of Wikipedia.
Of course, there are downsides to participation inequality, and you can read about them in the first link above. But at the end of the day, the experts tell us that there are few things anyone can do to move these percentages. To a certain extent, there's comfort in knowing that what you experience on a forum like TVWBB is not unusual--that this phenomenon is common to most mature communities.
Why do people lurk? This Wikipedia article discusses some of the reasons. At the end of the day, we have to remember that lurkers are the majority. They're the ones reading most of the posts. We should not be surprised when someone from the majority wins a prize drawing. We should offer a friendly, welcoming environment in the hopes of converting lurkers into posters. And I will continue to do what I can, like making some prizes available only to posters, to encourage people to register and post messages, as in the recent Q&A sessions with Kevin Kolman and Famous Dave Anderson.
So what do you think? Why do you lurk at some forums and not others? What motivates you to post? What do you think can be done to convert lurkers into posters? Or should we even be worried about that?
