90-9-1 and the phenomenon of "lurking"

[skreutzer]

I have some trouble understanding why "lurking" is a thing. Isn't it quite obvious that the 90% don't have the time to actively engage with the particular project, community or material? Additionally, just consider how many projects are out there. Has "lurking" been a theme in earlier media, like the newspaper or radio where consumers technically didn't have much means to contribute (what's the total lurker ratio compared to all call-in segments in radio programming, or letters to the editor - if not dropped/ignored?).

In digital, it's not one-to-many one-way passive broadcast any more, but this also means that everybody can create/produce now and broadcast/distribute to everybody else, which is exactly what people do, they each run their own projects, communities and collections of material. Even more so, all of its history isn't going away, so there's years and years of backlog + what gets digitalized from pre-print times to work on/with. Everybody who wants to contribute or create a project, very likely does already (somewhere) or could by now, easily. The dynamics in digital (conceptually, not considering artificially created legal or technical restrictions) are clearly that if an individual contributes to or creates something, if the result is published, it becomes available/shared with everybody else (on the network, globally, beyond) and not just the immediate physical surroundings of non-digital distribution or earlier more expensive centralized media infrastructure. Every creator/contributor, working slowly on his/her own project, at the same time receives all the contributions/creations by all the other people, and how to contribute to these as well if it's already laborious to work on one's own project? Once the project is completed and shared, it only adds to the offers available to all the other creators/contributors.

To how many projects have you contributed you're only a passive user/lurker of? And surely there are plenty of people in the population who don't have the interest, capacity, time or skill to engage with these projects, especially because of living busy lives that may be occupied with many other things non-digital, so they're "lurkers" (?) just passively using the material provided, merely as another offer/service. How many times have you actively contributed to ongoing road construction projects on the basis that you drive a car?

Therefore I think the 90-9-1 is useful to describe participation in projects, but I don't see how the 90% or "lurking" can ever be a bad thing that needs to be reduced and converted over to the 9% or 1%, that's more like a fight of diverting capacity and attention away from what people do otherwise/elsewhere. It sounds more to be about metrics to establish how "successful" a project is - but is an active contributor/creator ratio above 9/1 a good thing as it correlates with a lower user proportion, potentially indicating that the contributors/creators mostly do it for themselves with less outside relevance as a contribution/service beyond their own group? Or is it good because it indicates that former "lurkers" become quickly involved in the creation of the product they were first using themselves passively, but now help to make it better for themselves and the community? What does the ratio mean in absolute numbers, isn't 90-9-1 already totally amazing on the scale of Wikipedia? Just imagine if all the people who use Wikipedia to look something up would also edit pages regularly! Their 9-1 is still enough to make it one of the largest projects, and for the 1%, not everybody needs to actually create new articles (especially if for no good reason, as many and the popular ones do already exist).

Even if a project is entirely dead and has no single "lurker", contributor or creator, with libre-free licensing, it always can be picked up again by anybody at any time, and be of great use for each of the 90, 9 or 1 groups to find something that's already available, in comparison to not have such a project around, potentially starting one from scratch as a secondary activity, which might not be at all the main occupation/interest of the individual being already stressed out with an entirely different primary objective/activity. Peers are always free to decide to not contribute, which is perfectly fine, and there's no unequal higher non-peer authority that can make them work on projects they may not find useful or interesting or for which they lack the capacity.

[Joe Corneli]

I think lurking (passive learning) is not a bad thing, and anyway as you said it's pretty much inevitable.  One place where it might not work well is within an educational setting: if everyone is meant to get a minimum level of knowledge, then teachers will try to make sure that everyone gets that level.

A related concept is "freeloading".  Humans and other related species have a profound sense of what's fair and unfair.   No one would accuse me of being a freeloader if I buy a newspaper and don't write letters to the editor.  But most people would frown on stealing the newspaper.  Similarly if I work at the newspaper and don't get my articles in on time.

Since peeragogy is also about "peer production", both concepts are potentially relevant.