The evil that lurkers do
Okay, an extreme title. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the people who are not posting articles and commentary in the online world.
There have been a number of articles referencing Jakob Nielson's recent Alertbox on Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities. (TalkDigger digs up 50-odd references.) He sites a familiar ratio of readers to contributors to participants:
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.
The ratio has a nice stickiness with evidence from the early days of the Usenet and mailing lists to Amazon reviews and the Wikipedia. He goes on to offer some thoughts around mitigating the "inequality" and acknowledges that it will never go away completely.
Nielson comments on the negative effects of participation inequality, primarily that the voices and opinions of the non-participants do not get heard and therefore skew the dialog to those who raise their voices.
My take on this is that the balance is where it is. It is not necessarily bad or good. And I suspect this balance of participation even shows up in Real Life. I know many couples consisting of "the talkative one" and "the quiet one." Go to a party or watch the crowd at a conference and notice the balance of people who are doing most of the talking, responding and listening. It might not be 1-9-90, but there are people who are naturally more participative than others. Why should the online world be any different than the offline one?
Nielson offers some suggestions around "equalizing participation." I agree that these suggestions will be helpful, but they don't help without some key characteristics of the person in question:
- Passion. The primary aspect is passion - passion, excitement, engagement, anger over the topic and direction of the community. With a particularly passionate person, issues of writing comfort and time are quickly overcome.
- Writing comfort. Not writing skills, but comfort with communicating in the written word. Do they have the confidence to put their hand up, potentially to get it slapped? How supportive is the community? Another reason blogs are so great: the owner gets to control the conversation. I suspect the availability of audio and video technology enables many others to jump into the community, where the written word may not.
- Time. Do they have the time to devote to participating? I know this heavily impacts my ability to participate in the various email lists I have joined. And I see it from the other members as well.
In fact, I suspect there is an undercurrent of importance to the people who aren't doing all the talking (writing). First off, they are the audience. However much we want to think that everyone now has the ability to contribute content to the common good, this just isn't the case. Most of us are consumers of the content. But without the audience, what is the point of all this writing? If Amazon reviewers didn't think it was going to be helpful to write the reviews, why bother? If bloggers thought no one was listening, for whom are they writing?
Even more fun: who is to say that lurkers in one community aren't more active in other communities? Mightn't some people observe and listen and fuse the ideas across many communities to come up with their own great ideas that they discuss elsewhere, be that online or at the next conference?
This idea was discussed in a series of blogs a couple years ago in response to an EEKim article, Are Lurkers Bad?. I jumped in too with Lurking builds community.
6 Comment(s)
Hi Jack,
And hi Andrew -- who is at opposite end of the country from me, with you Jack in the middle. I think that gives us geo-proportionate representation on this minimal sampling...or something like that.
I've seen a study or so out there (can't put my fingers on it at the moment) that suggests that the tendency toward lurking is one of those things that have also made blogs more popular. Sort of fire and forget.
What amazes me (and you've followed the same discussion groups) is which discussion threads seem to generate the most responses. For the most part I'd never guess that it would a particular post that sparks the discussion.
What I have seen...although not sure of the scientific merit/validity of this...is that it seems to me that often the lurkers seem to chime in once the discussion begins to reach critical mass. As if they sit back for the most part, not wanting to be first...so if the thread generates minimal discussion and then tapers off...they just never participate.
Of course the biggest gag of all would be that there are only 200 users on the entire internet, with many many screen names and some days the use one, and some days another.
Dr. Dan
Your "audience" point really hits it home--I would build on it, and say even if unequal participation skews the opinions people hear, online discussions are still lightyears ahead of real-world equivalents; in the public sphere, Joe Random Observer can't simply chime in if he disagrees with a media figure, politician, or head of a company. Online, he can go from "lurker" to "participant" with a click of a mouse. Out in RL, we're all "lurkers."
The label"lurker has a negative, almost peeping Tom connotation which sets the tone for the dialogue as regards participation. Would commentors view the subject of this discussion from a differing perspective if "lurkers" were denoted as "observers"?
Secondly, how is participation measured? In a testimonial to Jack, I admit to mulling over, perhaps amending, and then applying some of his ideas when coaching clients. Am I thus relieved of the burden of being a "lurker"?
said:
Bob- This is an important point of the idea that I was trying to articulate in my last paragraph. People come to fora (forums) for all sorts of reasons. Hopefully, they come away with interesting ideas and new ways to think about things. If they apply the new ideas somewhere else, what does that make them?
It makes them smart cookies. Not peeping Toms.
Jack - Passion, writing comfort and time are the elements required for work on my blog. At best, I can publish 2 to 4 posts per month. But within my enterprise, I publish 2 to 4 posts or comments per hour. The difference is between Alpha Blogging opinion and expertise on the net and Beta Blogging routine mundane information on the intranet. More here http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog272.
Jordan
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KJolt Memberships
I have actually participated in several panels on Communities of Practice where the topic of lurkers came up. One community passionately defended the value of lurkers, as one of their survey's had shown that the folks gaining the greatest value from the community where the ones came to gain some sort of knowledge.
As for a community becoming skewed by the "loud voices" of the few, a lurker can either decide to participate when they feel the community is loosing the focus they came for, or move to another community more in line with their views. This is not necessarily bad, in either case, they are bringing new value to a community (either the one they begin to participate in, or the one they choose to join).