The 1% Rule
An informal rule that say only about 1% of the members of a community will contribute to that community, while all others will simply “lurk” and consume content. This matters because we tend to think of communities as bastions of diverse thought, when, in reality, most content is written by a very small subset of users.
Links
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Meet the man behind a third of what’s on Wikipedia
“Steven Pruitt has made nearly 3 million edits on Wikipedia and written 35,000 original articles…”
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Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
A Reddit post analyzing “super contributors” to various communities.
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Responsible for 65% of Vaccine Disinformation on Social Media
A 2021 study found that two-thirds of vaccine misinformation came from only 12 people.
Examples
During the 2016, many of the anti-Hillary memes that circulated on social media were actually created by the Internet Research Agency, which was funded by the Russian government. Many people who responded to these memes perhaps thought they were engaging with many other like-minded people, when they were really just forwarding the intended propaganda of a single entity.