Authored By:: [[P- Brendan Langen]], [[P- Rob Haisfield]]
Statistics over the years cite a 90-9-1 rule to contributors in online communities, and although that does not hold up across all communities, the majority of people fall into the consumption-only group (90%). Most site data is not publicly shared, but estimates range from 80-98% of people as lurkers, 1.9%-19% of people as editing/updating content, and .1-1% of people as primary contributors.
Looked at differently, the 90-9-1 rule also indicates the breakdown of contributions from users. In this group, 90% of posts come from 1% of users, 10% of posts come from 9% of users, while no posts come from 90% of users. Our closest public comparison to a discourse graph is Wikipedia. In 2006, 99.8% of visitors were lurkers, 0.2% edited pages, and only .003% were contributors.
This speaks to a large gap in the activity we want to see in a discourse graph. [[It will be important to capture the potential energy of information consumption]]. Additionally, we need to [[enable workflows and behaviors to facilitate synthesis]]. How can you lower the barriers for someone to meaningfully contribute?
[[Synthesis is supported by active reading]], and a number of tools assist with this.
[[LiquidText]] is built on the claim that systems must enable people to trace excerpts back to their original context to support active reading, because [[knowledge must be recontextualized to be usefully reused]]. The tool allows you to "pull out" excerpts and make pointers to context, and use these units on a canvas to weave together a larger understanding, albeit in a less formal fashion.
[[Hypothesis]] allows users to annotate webpages and documents in their margins, providing the option to further enrich a snippet with context. Sharing is built in to Hypothes.is, affording added context and active reading across groups. This enables social tagging, which helps users find related content and build community. [[Social tagging is a key user behavior to managing a decentralized knowledge graph]]. This can come in the form of text, likes or [[emoji reactions]].
[[Readwise]] offers a view towards actions a reader can take to save important notes and passages without considerable effort. [[P- Tiago Forte]] famously coined the term "progressive summarization," which is the behavior we are looking to develop in discourse graph communities - [[incrementally processing notes is a key user behavior to promote synthesis]]. Progressive summarization refers to consuming an information resource, taking the important parts out of it, rereading the important parts at a later date, summarizing the most important parts of that, and so on, until you only have the most important content.
How can we incentivize users to contribute? Perhaps [[anonymous author contributions]] combined with [[identifiable editors]] can increase the volume and quality of reviews while reducing bias. A helpful proxy to ask ourselves is [[what would a Web3 Wikipedia look like]]?