Do you create, leave comments or lurk?

What does it mean to "create, comment or consume"?

An article on wikipedia claims that in any website,
89% consume or "lurk"
10% leave comments and
1% create


The Pareto rule states that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people



Here's what a study noted (taken from the 1% rule wiki article):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

The "90–9–1" version of this rule states that for websites where users can both create and edit content, 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.

The actual percentage is likely to vary depending upon the subject matter. For example, if a forum requires content submissions as a condition of entry, the percentage of people who participate will probably be significantly higher than one percent, but the content producers will still be a minority of users. This is validated in a study conducted by Michael Wu, who uses economics techniques to analyze the participation inequality across hundreds of communities segmented by industry, audience type, and community focus.^[5]

The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1% principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012 suggested that 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.^[6] Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some form(7)

1.  Wu, Michael (April 1, 2010). "The Economics of 90–9–1: The Gini Coefficient (with Cross Sectional Analyses)". Lithosphere Community. Lithium Technologies, Inc. Retrieved 2010-07-10.
2. Jump up^ "BBC Online Briefing Spring 2012: The Participation Choice".
3. Jump up^ Hargittai, E. and Walejko, G. (2008) 'The Participation Divide: Content creation and sharing in the digital age', in Information, Communication and Society, vol. 11(2), pp. 389–408.
4. Jump up^ Hill, William C.; Hollan, James D.; Wroblewski, Dave; McCandless, Tim (1992). "Edit wear and read wear". Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM: 3–9.