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.
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.
Let me share an original thought I just came up with. As Paul Graham recently wrote, you can be an accidental moderate because you disagree with people out of intellectual honesty and critically analyzing the positions in an effort to learn something. So people like that contribute to steering conversations towards the truth.
(PS: Yes, what I wrote above was ironic on purpose.)
> The general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
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.
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.
But is all that thinking really worth it? I mean surely you don't want to say too much bullshit, or mislead people... But take this comment; would I really post it if I thought it would waste the time of some hundreds of people reading it?
Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.
I wish downvotes had a text field feedback option. I often downvote comments for reasons that may not be obvious to the author. That could be ripe for abusive messages, but still think it's a noteworthy idea.
The old Slashdot moderation system had a variant of this. You could assigns comment score and a reason for that score. It worked pretty well until users inevitably learned how to abuse it.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.
Writing for online credit, audience, influence, and/or "imaginary internet points" may not be money, but they are all extrinsic motivators in the sense Schopenhauer references.
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.
Tangential, but it's strange to me the sort of culture that Quora has cultivated over the years. It seems to tolerate and even encourage low quality content and contributors to the point that ignorance, misinformation and poorly researched opinionated answers thrive on a regular basis. That's not to say there aren't good contributors and content, but browse any one random topic today and you'll be forgiven for thinking you are on Yahoo Answers. Just no filter at all, extremely poor questions, offtopic comments posted as answers, people with no understanding of the subject shamelessly pretending to know what they are talking about, etc etc.
It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.
I browse Quora quite a lot, but I only follow writers I like, and no topics, to avoid exactly this. The average answer quality is dreadful.
I think the point about shamelessly pretending to understand, though, is a subtler question, and difficult to address. I follow people on a lot of topics I don't know about, and I've occasionally discovered later down the line than they're full of crap. And I realise in retrospect that I've helped them do it, upvoting seemingly well-researched answers because I appreciated the effort.
It really highlights the difficulty of figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority, and I could see myself being drawn into some reality-denying group a la flat-earthers or antivaxxers just because I happened to follow the wrong people at the start, and on their advice reject other answers.
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."
Yes but if everybody does that, the only thing that will remain in the history will be unchallenged inflammatory claims.
Which will lead most people passing by to consider that the topic is mostly driven from the point of view of this minority.
This is why we hear a lot about the SJW, anti-vax, the flat earther and so on these days: they make a lot of noise online, even if IRL we never see them because there are so few of them.
This is also why we can see extreme political point of views rising, because people are embolden to join in, reading mass of unchallenged content, pandering to their fear. IRL, they may not, it would not be socially acceptable and the barrier to entry would be bigger.
People generally don't say inflammatory things because they're inherently evil. They're scared, or mad, or have things going on in their life. Arguing online won't change that. Conversely, fixing those things may make trolling less appealing.
> on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people...
There are also big differences within this 1%. Even among the people who write regularly, there is probably a tiny minority that generates most of the text. Imagine people with no life, spending each day at least 10 hours online, typing without thinking too much, which allows them to post at least one comment each minute... doing this for years. Your comments are mostly lost in this ocean.
On Twitter that still seems to be a bad problem but it's less so here. Those types tend to say the same things over and over again and get dismissed or downvoted. Unless there are posters on HN that just happen to be 100x more interesting than everyone else... are there? :)
I think of that sometimes when writing. I try to avoid, for example, abbreviations: It's shorter for me to write, but it means 99 other people will need to decipher them.
Or not editing my post, things like that, that might save me time, but are multiplied by 99 on the other end.
This thinking actually causes me to post more, and get into more flamewars, because it bothers me when something obviously wrong is going to be seen by hundreds of people.
That's not just a feel, mon ami: that's explicitly the point of online marketing & propaganda. Their methods aren't new at this point and are fairly well documented.
> 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.
Life is about emotions and regret. If you don't have any emotions or regrets, you haven't lived. I hope people internalize that as well. Also, my top peeve on social media these days are virtue signaling goody-two-shoes. The paternalistic moralizing and talking down to isn't my cup of tea. If people wanted that, they could go read Aesop's Fables.
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...)
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.
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
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.
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.
I think it moreso has to do with that we ourselves only put time into so many things. For example, I myself probably read 99 or more articles on HN for every 1 I actually comment on. Take that to a general level, there are a lot of platfoms were I lurk, and very few were I actually participate. Putting your words on the screen takes mental effort that we selectively choose where to focus such efforts
It's pretty easy. Doing anything is a skill that you can hone by repeating it. There are lots of people who haven't posted anything and they are inexperienced at posting comments. Once you have posted a few hundred comments you've become comfortable with posting regularly. Then it suddenly becomes obvious that you cannot be super skilled at everything. Maybe you are a frequent HN user but not someone who answers questions on Stackoverflow.
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.
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' 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:
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.
To add to that, I was wondering earlier today if HN has seen an increase in traffic, this "1% activity", and / or longer visit times now that many of us are WFHing until further notice... I suspect so, but would love to know!
Someone asked me that today. There seems to be a slight increase in traffic, but there's so much fluctuation normally that it's impossible to say, and it ticked down a bit today relative to last Wednesday.
I suspect it's just noise. Perhaps our users are particularly honest and don't goof off on HN while working at home any more than they do while working at the office.
Given the demographics, is the 0.8% likely due to HN posters/readers being more at the introverted end of spectrum so slightly less inclined to engage?
I would make a basic assumption that most users have either at minimum two IP addresses or three they use for HN. One would be work, another home and at the minimum one would be mobile although I think mobile IP changes as you travel if I am not mistaken and not guaranteed to be static. So potentially more than three but these could be shared among HN users so maybe 2 at a minimum at the very least.
They do change, and quite a lot, which means users often have many mobile IP addresses. However, those same IP addresses often show up for many users, so it's hard to know how the counts shake out.
That'll be me...
Daily one hour train commute, and my IP often changes a number of times as I switch from tower to tower, as well as drop out due to no signal in places.
I also switch between networks as my mobile GSM and portable wifi are different providers.
I'm not sure that's a good assumption. Introverted users may be more likely to participate in online discussions since they prefer it over in-person conversations.
Hmm. I'm an introvert, and I find I'm less likely to participate in online discussions, mostly for the reason cycloptic mentioned above: online discussions will be read by more people and require extra care (which can be emotionally exhausting, especially on a contentious topic). I generally prefer to interact with fewer people, so one-on-one communication or small groups are ideal. You may be conflating introversion with shyness?
I tend to mix introversion with having an overly active internal thinking process.
I'm one of those people who pause before responding, because I'm thinking through my response before speaking, rather than blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
I find overthinking a response can also be inhibiting as I can fall into the "do I really need to say that...and now", so I don't.
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.
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.
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.
Those are both a bit too bureaucratic to be what the HN community finds intellectually interesting. There are a lot of submissions like this, often from trade journals, and they rarely do well because they lack motivation for a non-specialist audience to find them interesting. Usually there needs to be something tasty to entice the reader in, some hope of curiosity being satisfied. You can sometimes help with that by posting an initial comment in the thread explaining why you personally found an article interesting, especially if there's something non-obvious about it.
I appreciate the feedback. I feel like there is a healthcare revolution taking place that most people have no clue about, especially in terms of interoperability. I am constantly amazed at how few tech workers have any knowledge of FHIR and related technologies, especially considering the opportunities they provide to startups.
Also another one of my links includes Direct which is a healthcare technology that provides secure communication for clinicians that uses identity vetting to ensure the recipient is who they say they are. I wish it had wider adoption.
It's a communication problem. The way those articles are written simply doesn't communicate what's new or of interest there—at least not in a style that HN readers are likely to be open to.
What might work better is writing a blog-style article about each of these: what's new, what's different, why it matters—and then linking to some of these other more enterprisey or bureaucratic sources. If you decide to work on that, or know someone who is, feel free to contact hn@ycombinator.com because we might be able to give some tips about how to structure it for HN appeal. "New opportunities for startups in healthcare" is definitely a theme with a lot of HN juice, if presented the right way. "A healthcare revolution is taking place" is another.
One thing that would help is if the voice presenting this material comes from someone the community perceives as a peer—not necessarily an HN member but someone who could be. When first impressions suggest something dry and managerial, it gets pattern-matched into the same category as rote bureaucratic or industry sources, and people quickly close the tab.
I've looked closely at this data for years, and I don't think so. What there's a lot of is randomness.
It's of course possible that some people are clever enough that we don't even know what they're getting away with. But I can tell you that HN's anti-voting-ring software catches a great many cases. So many, in fact, that we'll often go through that list and remove the penalty on particularly good submissions, because sometimes people were clueless about trying to promote otherwise good content.
Edit: the other thing is that we regularly get independent confirmations that the anti-voting-ring software works...so at least it's not totally off.
I just try to post things I find interesting and that maybe others would too. And not worry about votes... mainly because as "dang" indicates (in comments above) most hn readers aren't logged in and therefore aren't voting anyway.
Never heard the term "brigading" before... but yeah I see that behavior elsewhere a lot... the regulars who echo-chamber each other.
People who choose to spend their time doing that are, I think, just wasting their time. Since I am skeptical by default a cacophony of voices doesn't convince me of anything other than there's a mob afoot.
Share what you find interesting and let the curiosity and comments fall where they may.
One thing I would like to see is #upvotes/story and #comments/story, both over time. Those might say something about the ‘liveliness’ of the community.
FWIW, I'm not logged in on every device. For example generally I'm not logged in on my mobile because I don't like typing on it. On a work computer I'm not logged in either.
Very. In the numbers above, 76% of page views are from users not logged in.
I was surprised it wasn't even higher, since I remember it as having been 95% in some past analysis. This is more likely because I measured it differently than because something massively changed.
Maybe this will echo out into the empty universe, but I thought I would mention a point that I think skews your data and conclusion. My hypothesis is that the reason you are seeing what seems to confirm the stated rule, is that it is the "1%" (edit: it is likely actually some subsection of the 1%) that controls access and creates immense barriers and a hostile environment for participation. I theorize too that the reason you are seeing an even lower (0.8%) creator rate, is that this forum even more than some of the bigger forums, polices and controls access even more than common.
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
You could make the opposite argument by picking the other number (8%), which would be a very high rate. So the independent variable here is how you choose to see it.
The other problem is that if the 1% Rule has any validity, then this is true of the internet in general, so you can't really meaningfully single out HN. I agree that finding communities that deviate from the rule would be interesting, if they weren't super small. (Super small communities are interesting for other reasons.)
By the way, if you saw the number of times we email people out of the blue about their HN submissions, offering them help with making them more interesting to the community, or simply letting them know that we were re-upping their post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), you might feel a bit less like this place is corrupt and so on. Optimizing for curiosity is the way we try to manage HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
> 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.
I had a longer reply that I was going to post, but then it got longer and more nuanced than I wanted to spend the time to type out, so I discarded it instead. I do this quite frequently.
This is not directly related to your comment (although the comment I didn't post was), but it's another interesting personal observation to add to the pile.
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.
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...
157 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air
(PS: Yes, what I wrote above was ironic on purpose.)
JS Mill, On Liberty
What a broad statement
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.
Also... then there's the problem of feedback, which is how you make progress in a conversation... but I fear I begin to digress.
Only accept pre-defined labels everyone agreed on + references to existing answers?
Alternatively only allow a refutation format which is simple to validate.
And make it clear that votes are only a show of sentiment since this is not a democracy we are talking about.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship
Writing for online credit, audience, influence, and/or "imaginary internet points" may not be money, but they are all extrinsic motivators in the sense Schopenhauer references.
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.
It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.
I think the point about shamelessly pretending to understand, though, is a subtler question, and difficult to address. I follow people on a lot of topics I don't know about, and I've occasionally discovered later down the line than they're full of crap. And I realise in retrospect that I've helped them do it, upvoting seemingly well-researched answers because I appreciated the effort.
It really highlights the difficulty of figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority, and I could see myself being drawn into some reality-denying group a la flat-earthers or antivaxxers just because I happened to follow the wrong people at the start, and on their advice reject other answers.
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
"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."
Which will lead most people passing by to consider that the topic is mostly driven from the point of view of this minority.
This is why we hear a lot about the SJW, anti-vax, the flat earther and so on these days: they make a lot of noise online, even if IRL we never see them because there are so few of them.
This is also why we can see extreme political point of views rising, because people are embolden to join in, reading mass of unchallenged content, pandering to their fear. IRL, they may not, it would not be socially acceptable and the barrier to entry would be bigger.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-...
There are also big differences within this 1%. Even among the people who write regularly, there is probably a tiny minority that generates most of the text. Imagine people with no life, spending each day at least 10 hours online, typing without thinking too much, which allows them to post at least one comment each minute... doing this for years. Your comments are mostly lost in this ocean.
There are many notable accounts, from leaders and experts in the community, who don't make that list.
Popularity and prolificity are not measures of quality.
I think of that sometimes when writing. I try to avoid, for example, abbreviations: It's shorter for me to write, but it means 99 other people will need to decipher them.
Or not editing my post, things like that, that might save me time, but are multiplied by 99 on the other end.
Life is about emotions and regret. If you don't have any emotions or regrets, you haven't lived. I hope people internalize that as well. Also, my top peeve on social media these days are virtue signaling goody-two-shoes. The paternalistic moralizing and talking down to isn't my cup of tea. If people wanted that, they could go read Aesop's Fables.
(* Per Github traffic stats.)
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.
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.
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.
( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation :-) )
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' 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:
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.Edit: I've added something above though.
I suspect it's just noise. Perhaps our users are particularly honest and don't goof off on HN while working at home any more than they do while working at the office.
> Perhaps our users are particularly honest
Or particularly dishonest and have historically goofed off on HN at the office everyday until they ran out of content to read!
I also switch between networks as my mobile GSM and portable wifi are different providers.
I'm one of those people who pause before responding, because I'm thinking through my response before speaking, rather than blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
I find overthinking a response can also be inhibiting as I can fall into the "do I really need to say that...and now", so I don't.
Of course the existence of guidelines does not imply the existence of guideline-following.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20422094
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18363410
Those are both a bit too bureaucratic to be what the HN community finds intellectually interesting. There are a lot of submissions like this, often from trade journals, and they rarely do well because they lack motivation for a non-specialist audience to find them interesting. Usually there needs to be something tasty to entice the reader in, some hope of curiosity being satisfied. You can sometimes help with that by posting an initial comment in the thread explaining why you personally found an article interesting, especially if there's something non-obvious about it.
Also another one of my links includes Direct which is a healthcare technology that provides secure communication for clinicians that uses identity vetting to ensure the recipient is who they say they are. I wish it had wider adoption.
What might work better is writing a blog-style article about each of these: what's new, what's different, why it matters—and then linking to some of these other more enterprisey or bureaucratic sources. If you decide to work on that, or know someone who is, feel free to contact hn@ycombinator.com because we might be able to give some tips about how to structure it for HN appeal. "New opportunities for startups in healthcare" is definitely a theme with a lot of HN juice, if presented the right way. "A healthcare revolution is taking place" is another.
One thing that would help is if the voice presenting this material comes from someone the community perceives as a peer—not necessarily an HN member but someone who could be. When first impressions suggest something dry and managerial, it gets pattern-matched into the same category as rote bureaucratic or industry sources, and people quickly close the tab.
It's of course possible that some people are clever enough that we don't even know what they're getting away with. But I can tell you that HN's anti-voting-ring software catches a great many cases. So many, in fact, that we'll often go through that list and remove the penalty on particularly good submissions, because sometimes people were clueless about trying to promote otherwise good content.
Edit: the other thing is that we regularly get independent confirmations that the anti-voting-ring software works...so at least it's not totally off.
Never heard the term "brigading" before... but yeah I see that behavior elsewhere a lot... the regulars who echo-chamber each other.
People who choose to spend their time doing that are, I think, just wasting their time. Since I am skeptical by default a cacophony of voices doesn't convince me of anything other than there's a mob afoot.
Share what you find interesting and let the curiosity and comments fall where they may.
Any way to divide logged in weekly sessions by all weekly sessions, or something like that?
Though I don't know how widespread such usage is.
I was surprised it wasn't even higher, since I remember it as having been 95% in some past analysis. This is more likely because I measured it differently than because something massively changed.
Most of the time when I submit something, I’m on my phone, so I’m always logged, because session never ends.
If I had to log in every time, for sure I will browse « anonymously ». But once your logged in, why bother log out ?
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
The other problem is that if the 1% Rule has any validity, then this is true of the internet in general, so you can't really meaningfully single out HN. I agree that finding communities that deviate from the rule would be interesting, if they weren't super small. (Super small communities are interesting for other reasons.)
By the way, if you saw the number of times we email people out of the blue about their HN submissions, offering them help with making them more interesting to the community, or simply letting them know that we were re-upping their post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), you might feel a bit less like this place is corrupt and so on. Optimizing for curiosity is the way we try to manage HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- 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...
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.
Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk : contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.
This is not directly related to your comment (although the comment I didn't post was), but it's another interesting personal observation to add to the pile.
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.
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.