Post in Participation Inequality

A few thoughts:

1. The more GS helps us measure participation
and see it in summary views the easier it will be to test new ideas.

2. I think web views on topics and posts over say the last week would be a
useful way to allow people to navigate some posts/topics.

3. A "recommend" or four/five star rating option next to posts would be a nice
option even if it is primarily done via the web  and  a recommed click through
in the e-mail footer. (I wonder if we could automatically Digg and Redit posts
recommended from out site?

4. I guesstimate that E-Democracy's use of the two post in 24 hours tool
expands our 1 percent of most active to 3 percent and our 9 percent up to 20 in
some cases. It would be interesting to document our real numbers, compare
forums, and see if we can broaden participation through facilitation/tools
toward specific improvement goals.

See:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

End bit ...

Your only real choice here is in how you shape the inequality curve's angle Are
you going to have the "usual" 90-9-1 distribution, or the more radical 99-1-0.1
distribution common in some social websites? Can you achieve a more equitable
distribution of, say, 80-16-4? (That is, only 80% lurkers, with 16%
contributing some and 4% contributing the most.)
 Although participation will always be somewhat unequal, there are ways to
better equalize it, including:
Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump
through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a
star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero
effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they're
doing. For example, Amazon's "people who bought this book, bought these other
books" recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don't have
to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system.
Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple
activity of reading (or using) something will "wear" it down and thus leave its
marks -- just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you
prepare the most.
Edit, don't create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing
templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a
template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the
horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example,
most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
Reward -- but don't over-reward -- participants. Rewarding people for
contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and
thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can
also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance
notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don't
give too much to the most active participants, or you'll simply encourage them
to dominate the system even more.
Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then
people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned
out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra
prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who've proven
their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.Your website's design
undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse. Being
aware of the problem is the first step to alleviating it, and finding ways to
broaden participation will become even more important as the Web's social
networking services continue to grow.