
1% rule - punnerud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
======
dang
I once ran the numbers for HN and was surprised at how closely they matched
this rule. Maybe I'll do it again.

Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct
users, so all we can do is guess.

The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number
of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1%
rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP
or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then
0.008 is a lower bound.

Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided
by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That
doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to
total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That
ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to
total:

    
    
       posters      logged-in
      ---------  *  ---------
      logged-in       total
      
       = 0.36 * 0.23
       = 0.0828
    

So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are
bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the
same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it
before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude
apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but
that's another cognitive bias talking.

~~~
alecco
I used to submit more years ago, but it got ridiculous to get votes. I suspect
there must be a LOT of brigading to get posts out of the /newest cesspool.

~~~
test1235
The internet feels very hostile nowadays - it seems like there's no end of
people ready to take any comment out of context, and misconstrue to start an
argument.

~~~
dang
HN's guidelines are designed to dampen that. Example: " _Please respond to the
strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that
's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

Of course the existence of guidelines does not imply the existence of
guideline-following.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
cycloptic
I hope many of us internalized this early. It's not very accurate, but I try
to think of this as meaning that on average, everything I post online is being
read by a minimum of 99 people, multiplied by either the upvote count on the
thread (for HN) or the number of active followers I have (for Twitter). It has
helped me to always think this to myself before posting something.

I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to
easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly
emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.

~~~
yingw787
That's why I left Quora. I'm a really gullible person, and I was going to
respond to somebody who posted something inflammatory, then I realized I had
the option to just walk away. So I did.

I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market
fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't,
you'll never hear from them again.

~~~
rapnie
Good guide to avoiding trolls. Golden rule: "A conversation is not a contest"

[https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...](https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Trolls.md)

~~~
jazzdev
Some very insightful thoughts in that link. I especially liked these two:

"People who provide challenging opinions are not trolling so long as they are
not deviating from the conversation at hand. There are some people whose only
goal is to attain emotional harmony. When a challenging opinion is encountered
it is easy for some people to view this disruption to the social norm as
trolling, when it likely isn't."

"Some people are easily offended. When a person engages in a conversation
directly without distraction they aren't trolling simply because you became
emotional."

------
Hokusai
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but
> it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. ... only 23%
> of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as
> lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense
> contributors of content.

This is something important to take into account. I can be a lurker in Hacker
News but a top contributor in my towns gardeners forum.

Any given person has a maximum time that can dedicate to lurk or contribute.
But, one hour of lurking has way more coverage than one hour of contributing.
e.g. I can read Reddit, Hacker News, and Wikipedia and still have time left to
eat breakfast. But, I want to contribute a new Wikipedia article, probably I
will need that complete hour or even more. So, I just contribute to 1
community while lurking in the rest.

~~~
LMYahooTFY
Really good points.

Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk :
contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Unless you're a paid online marketer / shillbot, or maybe some sort of
journalist / blogger, I suspect this is true for everyone on the intrawebs.

------
ecdavis
On top of that, some percentage of users who _do_ contribute content are just
recycling/reiterating content they've seen have success in that community
before. Reposts, memes, predictable opinions, etc. The number of people who
actively create the culture of an online community (and, I suspect, offline
communities) is pretty small.

~~~
rzzzt
Where does the novelty element start, though? Someone could come and argue
that your comment is also predictable, as is my reply below it.

~~~
nhumrich
Thats what is most interesting about human innovation and creativity in
general. There are very very very few original ideas out there. Almost any
idea anyone has had, a large number of people have had it. And most innovation
is just tiny tweaks to existing formulas, over time. In fact, if you
understand the backstory behind most innovations, you realize it really wasn't
all that impressive. There were many proposed models for flight before the
wright brothers. They stumbled upon the right mixture. Modern day car fuel
engines have essentially evolved over centuries of perfecting "torches" (fire
and gas to create heat) The people who make history are simply the first ones
to act upon these thoughts. So, you become a content creator/culture setter,
by simply being the first one to vocalize your thoughts.

~~~
casefields
That is essentially the point in Gladwell's famous article "In the Air | Who
says big ideas are rare?"

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-
air](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air)

------
nyfresh
Long time lurker here.I often feel I have nothing useful to contribute.So I
don't. You're welcome.

~~~
dredmorbius
What I discovered, decades ago, was that posting questions, or even better,
answers, _even wrong ones_ (unintentionally) is a phenomenal way to learn
things.

That still holds true. Though it helps profoundly to not insist on being
wrong.

Which I try to do. Not always successfully.

~~~
abyssin
I once posted a honest question and I have to say I felt chilled by the
downvotes. I'd have expected votes to reflect a more constructive attitude.

~~~
dredmorbius
I consider myself something of an HN contrarian.

There are some downvotes, though on balance I've been better received than I'd
expected.

Sometimes researching on your own to indicate you've attempted clarification,
helps. "Did you mean / are you referring to X? ..."

------
taxicabjesus
We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we
can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no
matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other
people just as good as you.

The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual
snowflakes are not special.

The 1% of people who contribute to an online community are either people
who've gotten to the point that they think they have something to contribute,
or they're crapflooders with nothing better to do.

Sometimes a few people (say, 1-in-10-million) rise above the ruckus and do
something exceptional, or lay the groundwork for a future generation to build
upon. In the last two centuries we've had a series of developments by people
who laid the foundation for our species to achieve liftoff: James Clerk
Maxwell, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Hewlett & Packard, Grace
Hopper, William Shockley, and a hundred thousand remarkable/mildly-remarkable
others.

Hopefully in the next few decades our species can capitalize on the
foundations provided by our predecessors, and we can make it into orbit.

But most people are "average" or below average. My pseudonym started as my
reports of an unremarkable person trying to make observations of average
people's struggles. I grew up in a top 10% income household (parents took my
sibling and myself on vacations), had a reasonable college fund (which was not
well-spent), and didn't appreciate how the other 90% lived until I started
driving around in my taxi.

Our present engineered shutdown of the economy for a significant percentage of
the 90% of people who are no longer needed as farmers should be used as an
opportunity to reconsider how things are done for the 99% of people who are
just trying their best to get by.

------
hyperman1
Same goes for bugs. 90 pct of your users doesn't even report downtime. A
report on something non major is rare. I learned to listen to reported
problems carefully, however weird.

~~~
koheripbal
Depends on the user. Some report every blip in their wifi.

~~~
hyperman1
Funny you say that. We had someone in a remote office complaining of
neverending WIFI problems, but never reproducable. None of the coworkers
mentioned any problems. All network statistics said everything fine. One day I
happen to be in the neighbourhood so let's take a look.

Turns out the line was upgraded by the phone company, but the old modem never
removed. So there was a new phone line connected to a new modem connected to
nothing. Next to it a literally crumbling phone line, an old modem thrown on
the ground and buried under a mess of boxes and overheating, connected to
their core router. Monitoring was a mess of statistics from the old and new
system thrown together, so nobody noticed for over 2 years.

Why she was the only complainer at that office, I will never understand. But
she stopped complaining that very day.

------
mikekchar
I've been doing a Twitch development stream (a couple hours a day working on a
dwarf fortress game in Rust). In the stream, I'll have about 90% lurkers, 10%
people who engage in chat and about 1% that have sent me actual PRs for the
code :-) It's very interesting. (BTW, I should be streaming now... Bad
Mike...)

------
perilunar
1% sounds bad, but compared to pre-internet days it's pretty good. Consider a
large city newspaper: probably hundreds of journalists and letter writers, but
millions of readers, so much less than 1%.

~~~
magicsmoke
Also speaks to the nature of influence and power throughout history. Usually
it's only around 1% of the human population that can reach and impact the
lives of more than a few hundred others (roughly the size of a small village
where you can get to know everyone) and expand their influence over countries
and empires of millions. Likewise, history only records the details of the
lives of far less than 1% of all people that have ever lived. If you were one
of the peasant masses, your entire life is summarized by whatever tidbits of
trivia historians can glean from the artifacts from the grave of the one lucky
person that they happened to find. Same idea, 1% of all the graves that ever
existed serve to illustrate the lives of the rest of humanity to future
historians.

Really gives you a perspective on where an individual's life fits into the
grand scheme of things. If you don't make it into the history books, in a 100
years once everyone who ever knew you as a person has passed it'll be as if
you never existed at all.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Even those people in the history books, it's hard to care about them really
beyond caricatured silhouettes of who history portrayed them to be.

------
Chathamization
I think this is a key to understanding online discourse. A lot of the stuff
you see is generated by a very small percentage of the users (probably much
less than 1% if you look at the numbers[1]), and this small percentage likely
consists of the more problematic users. Consider that:

\- The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the
time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw
out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an
accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber
the latter.

\- The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the
amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media
and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with
a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time.

Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of
(often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users.
The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It
shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We
should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a
reflection of human behavior as a whole.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/)

~~~
californical
This was a really interesting comment to read that I feel accurately
summarizes most of the points being made here. Thanks!

------
thedogeye
Commenting just to mess with the ratios on this rule.

~~~
philips4350
count me in too !

~~~
codegladiator
Hardly making a dent here !

------
yamrzou
Related discussion: "Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane
People (2019)"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827)

------
dredmorbius
For Google+, by one measure (all registered profiles), the "1%" were actually
the 0.16%

When considered against all profiles _which had posted at least once_ , which
gets around the forced-account dynamic, the comparison of 0.16% vs. 5.09%, is
... approximately π%: 3.1434185% Much closer to the 1% rule, and probably more
accurately reflecting actual lurkers, which should bring it even closer in
line.

[https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-
the...](https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the-activity-
on-google-plus/)

NB: The research above was based on methods I'd developed, and reached results
quite similar to my own, though it was done independently and I had no idea it
was performed until Eric Enge published it.

Communicating just how thin active G+ usership was, to many of those active
I=users, proved surprisingly hard. People have little innate grasp of
statistics or very large numbers -- 2.2 billion+ profiles at the time.

Also, MAU (monthly active users) is a far better measure than regisration
counts.

Especially for mandatory accounts.

------
knzhou
This is extended in the post/article "Most of What You Read on the Internet is
Written by Insane People" [0].

> The 1% rule is of course just another way of saying that the distribution of
> contributions follows a Power Law Distribution, which means that the level
> of inequality gets more drastic as you look at smaller subsets of users.

> Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute
> about two-thirds of the site's edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed
> than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule.

> 167,113 of Amazons book reviews were contributed by just a few "top-100"
> reviewers; the most prolific reviewer had written 12,423 reviews. How
> anybody can write that many reviews — let alone read that many books — is
> beyond me.

> YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video
> you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day
> commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of
> the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of
> videos without watching them.

> If you consume _any_ content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming
> content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and
> energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ
> from the general population in important ways. I don't really know what to
> do with this observation except to note that it seems like it's worth
> keeping in mind when using the Internet.

Of course, that post's author is clearly insane. With 72k reputation and 1000
posts on Stack Exchange, I'm proudly insane. And if you're about to reply with
a witty comment, you might just be insane, too. ;)

0:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/)

------
hrdwdmrbl
A Redditor did an analysis of Reddit's ratio and it's more like 98-x-y (x and
y were not broken out):
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/let...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/lets_hear_it_for_the_lurkers_the_vast_majority_of/)

------
saagarjha
Hello, hundred people that'll read this comment! I can't hear what you have to
say, but hopefully it's not _too_ scathing.

------
mrunkel
> A 2005 study of radical Jihadist forums found 87% of users had never posted
> on the forums, 13% had posted at least once, 5% had posted 50 or more times,
> and only 1% had posted 500 or more times.[5]

This struck me as a bit funny. I can imagine the 87% being the NSA, BND and
other law enforcement watching the activity on the forum.

------
dfee
I remember the days of early social networking: I.e. pre-mass networking like
we have now with FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

It seemed then that more individuals participated then, than do today
(literally, those Sam individuals have fallen off).

Anyway, I wonder at what size of “community” this principle takes hold.
Certainly, some form of it is true at the scale of modern social media as
mentioned above, and it seems the same for the quarterly class updates that
come from my college. But at 20 people we seem to have a sort of “small group
dynamics” principle take over.

And maybe, then the right way to think about this is that as the groups size
approaches one, I should be applying this model to groups as a whole (“in a
collection of small groups, only 1% flourish, 9% stay stagnant, and 90% are
silent”).

------
superfamicom
I feel like this should take spam and bots into account. I run a wiki and most
edits are by bots that I rollback. I don't add captcha to not further dissuade
people from contributing.

~~~
alexdumitru
Add a hidden checkbox. If checked, it's definitely a bot. You get rid of more
than 99.99% of bots, from my experience.

------
k__
I had the feeling that there are more creators lately, but since Smartphones
and mobile internet got big, there are also magnitudes more lurkers online, so
it's probably still right

------
zw123456
There is also the concept of partial consumption. Often you might click on
something you think might be interesting, peruse or preview it, then decide it
wasn't as interesting as you thought and move on. Did you actually consume
that content or did you preview it? There is no way to know if someone is
lurking, actually fully consuming the content or simply previewing it. There
is probably no way to prove this but my guess is that 90% of the consumers are
actually previewers.

------
qwerty123457
This applies to real life as well. I'd replace "lurker" with passive,
"contributor" with active, and "creator" with changer.

------
jcims
I blab online quite a bit (in comments only, no blog or anything), but I
rarely vote/like/etc. Does that make me more or less of a narcissist?

~~~
kirubakaran
blowhards ⊂ narcissists

( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation
:-) )

~~~
jcims
An astute one at that

------
lerie1982
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but
> it applies more specifically to any given Internet community.

What a broad statement

------
WiPo
Well, this kind of disproportion would only be worse in traditional media:
dozens of writers serving millions of newspaper/magazine readers.

~~~
lonelappde
Even worse, each article has only 1 writer for all readers!

------
isseu
I really like this reddit post about this topic: Most of What You Read on the
Internet is Written by Insane People
[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/)

~~~
Fiveplus
I wish there was a similar analysis for comments left on boards like this one
and reddit (which I left earlier this year because the website just isn't what
it used to be).

Although, I would say it's an interesting take on Amazon reviews. A place not
many people believe could be as popping as it is.

------
pedalpete
How should we take it if we have 60%+ of users creating content, and very few
lurkers? Is that a good thing? Or under-optimized?

------
visarga
Wikipedia is confusing. Which is it?

> The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the
> Internet represents approximately 99% of the people who view that content.

or

> 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet
> community , stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content,
> while the other 99% of the participants only lurk .

------
the__prestige
I find that if I am excited about a subject, I tend to participate a lot more
(create/edit) than if I am simply consuming. I think there is a 1% rule for
/topics/ as well, i.e. I as a user am interested in actively
creating/contributing to 1% of all topics I see...

------
ladzoppelin
Things "even out" here, its been like that for years. The top comments are
usually smart with added inflammatory BS that only top comments possess. You
can actually find really good advice, about many subjects, right after that
first block of unstoppable up-votes.

------
lawry
I wonder how having the amount of posts you made (like forums do) influences
this number. And subsequently how others on the platform respond (since it's
in their best interest to be as kind as possible to new posters to make the
community grow?)

------
nixpulvis
I wonder how social distancing is effecting online posting numbers right about
now?

------
summerdown2
My prediction: this will be the one post where the 1% rule doesn't apply, as a
much larger number will be spurred into action by the topic in question - and
end up actually saying something.

~~~
kuu
It's funny, because in the list of comments, the comment above yours says he's
doing exactly that :)

------
woopwoop
I would be very interested in understanding the psychology of the 1%. I would
bet they (we? I mostly lurk, but am still probably at least in the top 10%)
are a very weird bunch.

~~~
themodelplumber
I have worked closely with some phenomenal 1%-ers. :-) They are really
efficient at processing broad information in what you could call a shallow
manner. They also don't feel the depth-of-comprehension pressure that some of
us 99%-ers feel.

To them it's just interesting, interesting, ah wow, next thing, ok cool...that
sort of thing. It's like rolling down the windows in your car, letting in some
outside air. Sharing is fun, in part because the personally-felt pressure to
_do_ in response (learn about it, make something of it) is low, in their
experience.

The 99% audience is comprised of a lot of people who are a FOMO audience, and
this flow can create serious stress for the portion of those people who read
about a new idea and they feel the need to _do_ something about it. Meanwhile
the 1% crew are often sharing third-party info briefly and broadly, with brief
commentary, but no real interest or pressure to seriously do something or make
something.

IMO each group can be said to carry really impressive gifts/benefits. And
encouraging lurkers to post is always nice, but many of them also secretly
wish for a more inviting / less critical community. HN has a _lot_ of
commenters ready to smash the next idea into bits by intuiting its flaws, and
some will naturally take that as a sign of a toxic community, or at least one
that isn't as welcoming in their view. It's tough to work on this issue
because it can radically affect the balance of the community psychology and
upset larger groups of people.

------
lonelappde
This is not a scientific measurement. "1%" is an idiom for "very few". "9%" is
a mismathematization of "10%" meaning "few".

------
spsrich2
I thought it was the basis of consulting companies as was told to me by an old
boss: "if you know 1% more than the other guy you are the expert!"

------
ohiovr
I estimated that about 1 out of 100 would review and or rate my apps. Except
for paid then it was more like 1 out of 25 but that might be an exception.

------
panny
What percent get banned? There are plenty of percents who would happily edit
pages on wikipedia about politics, but those pages tend to be locked.

~~~
dredmorbius
From G+, in the final months of the service, daily creation _and deletion_ of
Communities (not Profiles, though a related proxy measure) was in the 1,000s
per day.

For Profiles, odds of being deleted (usually a banning consequence AFAICT) was
far higher for those which had posted than those which hadn't.

Given churn in troll and spam accounts, percentages can be quite high, even
multiples of legitimate accounts.

Both observations based on outside measurements -- I am not and have never
been a Google employee.

------
mitchtbaum
[https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk](https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk)

------
vpears87
Applies well to political involvement of any kind. Or just any social
organization supporting a cause

------
897yh42drj98u0
That 1% really flatters themselves if they think of themselves as "creators".

~~~
jackcosgrove
Oscar Wilde's got you covered.

[https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html](https://www.wilde-
online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html)

> THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING

Reflecting on my internet posting history, sometimes it does seem like a whole
lot of nothing. But I still like it.

------
danschumann
You're 1 in 100, poster.

------
neoddish
<h1>NICE!</h1>

