“... only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.”
This is why “social listening” companies (which often amount to “Twitter listening” companies) present a very warped picture of reality when they try to extrapolate general consumer interests from the content and frequency of posts by a tiny minority of Twitter’s users. I also discussed this a little in “Twitter’s growth conundrum”: https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-conundrum-8339eda1...
I've measured this directly several times across several sites myself.
Google+'s low regular-engagement rates (0.16% of all profiles) actually starts to look more reasonable given:
1. Google created G+ profiles for EVERY Android, Gmail, and YouTube user from ~2012 - 2016 (may have been 2015), or about 3 billion accounts in all.
2. The 1% rule.
I'd made that measurement in 2015, Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting followed up with a much larger sample but the same basic methodology, to confirm and expand on my findings:
When G+ was shutting down, I had the opportunity to look at data concerning its 8-million-plus Communities. The vast majority of those had at best one user. Even in the final months of the site communities were being created and removed (or deleted) at a furious rate -- thousands per day. From November 2018 - January 2019, several hundred net new communities were created.
The most hyperactive communities (and posters) were almost entirely spam. There were numerous of what I considered legitimate and healthy communities, most with anywhere from a handful of members to a few thousand. More than 10k tended to peter off into noise territory quickly, and based on overall engagement, the sweet spot seemed to be somewhere in the 2k - 3k range, if some of my analysis bears out.
Given the 90/9/1 rule, that would mean about 200-300 actual active users, and a dominent core group of 20-30, which seems to be where most online discussions find themselves most "real", for want of a better term.
Quantity-based measures of quality can be exceedingly misleading. And based on the headline of this article alone, the impression that it's Twitter itself that is somehow unusual or remarkable in this story is quite misleading. This is a general trait of any social discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
“... only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.”
This is why “social listening” companies (which often amount to “Twitter listening” companies) present a very warped picture of reality when they try to extrapolate general consumer interests from the content and frequency of posts by a tiny minority of Twitter’s users. I also discussed this a little in “Twitter’s growth conundrum”: https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-conundrum-8339eda1...