Encouraging Community Contribution And Participation

Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute
- Summary:
  - 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.
- Most systems are not getting a representative sampling from their websites
  - Only 1% of users contribute, they differ from the 99% who don't
  - Page rank may make SERPs irrelevant to the 99% who don't make links to useful things. The SERPs are dominated by the 0.1% who do make links.
- Solutions
  - Make it easier to contribute - Clicking a star rating is easier than writing a review
  - Participation is a side effect - Amazon's other users who bought this book also bought this books. Just browsing reading the site has an effect.
  - Edit, don't create - Let users modify rather than create. Provide templates to modify.
  - Reward - but don't over-reward - participants. Example rewards:
    - discounts, advance notice of new products, gold stars, other preferential treatment
  - Promote Quality Contributors - Keeps the good contributions from the seldom contributors above the noise from frequent contributors.