Multi-user, contribution-dependent UGC platforms face a typical problem — the participation inequality. Majority of users don’t participate and remain mostly an audience. A very small number of users contribute to a huge majority of the content and/or user activities. This ‘participation inequality’ is represented by the 90:9:1 rule.

The 90:9:1 was termed a ‘rule’ after a 2014 peer-reviewed paper titled “The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study” published by Trevor van Mierlo.

While this study was oriented toward digital health social networks, its effect on every social platform has led it to be a rule of thumb in the digital marketing world.

Who are the Lurkers

Approx. 90% of the users in any given community are lurkers. They’re there only as an audience and do not contribute to the community. Even if they sometimes do, it’s negligible enough to not be a factor in this ratio.

Who are the Contributors

Approx. 9% of people in a community contribute from time to time, but that’s about it. You won’t see a lot of new content coming from their end, mostly just edits or contributions to existing content on any platform.

Who are the Creators

These are the 1% that account for most content on a platform. All the other users of the platform are piggy-backing off of their research, narrative, and opinions. Sometimes, people from this group are active enough to post something in just a few minutes after an incident.

On most communities, only a select few contribute while the majority are merely observers. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Web3 facilitates an increase in engagement and value creation for all members and hence the ratios in the 90:9:1 rule can get significantly altered.

Web3 has Native Assets

The fact that platforms like Ethereum allow community members to make transactions with a currency that’s based on their own foundation gives rise to two things. First, all members feel just that much more secure while making transactions, giving them the confidence to go ahead with them in the first place.

Secondly, the nativity of their currencies and other assets like NFTs is an incentive in itself for the users to be more active since that confirms gains of some sort. Moreover, as this property is inherent to Web3, it can be available on a majority of the platforms and isn’t restricted to Ethereum itself.

Tokens

The same applies to tokens in Web3 communities. Built into the framework of being part of the community, owning a token isn’t so much of an added incentive as it is part and parcel of the community. This gives members skin in the game since they now own a piece of the community, automatically incentivizing them to engage and work towards the community’s betterment.

In the words of Web3 enthusiast DocTom — “By tokenising communities or fandoms, creators and brands can formalise this notion of shared ownership and turn member agents into co-owning stakeholders and co-governing principles.”

Decentralized Platforms

Members of a Web3 community don’t have the threat of governance by the virtual overlords turning decentralization platforms into safer spaces for all members. The members’ activities are looked at by other members without an algorithm as a mediary. When things go awry and something is questionable, members of the community can put precautionary measures into action instead of waiting on the platform itself to deal with it.

Anonymity

Another one of the fundamentals of Web3, anonymity is a boon to the community members. Since you can log in to any Web3 platform, even the currency-based ones, using a pseudonym, users are just that much more comfortable voicing their opinions.

Users of Web3 platform can remain anonymous and therefore are more comfortable voicing their opinion leading to many more contributing and creating.

Pseudonyms take away the possibility of any consequence coming out of the internet and haunting people in real life, like being subjected to scams or any other malicious activity. Members can interact with each other on the blockchain without giving up their personal information or data, thus giving them a little more confidence in creating and posting content.

Web3 allows you to retain your identity, granting members a level of security. Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

CUDOS, a cloud-based computing network, in their article Privacy and Identity in Web3 gives a deeper insight into how pseudonyms play an integral role. They stated that “Authors and activists working under pseudonyms can still build reputations, establish ongoing relationships, and cultivate trust and respect. But they do so on terms that they set themselves.” And that is what Web3 basically grants its users, the ability for them to set their own terms while remaining anonymous.

Transparent/Open Source

While this might not look like a very relative point in the first go, it might just be the biggest difference between Web2 and Web3. Since Web3 platforms are open source, a community can come together to vote on and decide what they don’t like about the platform, figure out the backend, and take the problem out from the very roots, giving rise to a much more inclusive and collaborative platform in the end.

The only thing you can do about the 90:9:1 rule is to work towards altering the amount of participation in any community. If you want to build a community that bridges the disparity between the lurkers and the contributors on Web3, here’s what you can do:

Make Contributing Easier

Logically, this step is very simple. The easier it is to do something, the more people will do it. So, make it easy to contribute to your community by using different ideas like presets for natural language postings (e.g. font/font color on Instagram stories) and a point-based rating system for reviews (like the one you see on Uber).

This becomes much easier on a Web3 platform since the decentralized nature ensures that members have to participate, otherwise the platform itself is bound to fail.

Make Participation A Side Effect

Participation will definitely increase if it requires no effort at all. For example, in a Web2 scenario, once you look at a specific product on Amazon, the algorithm will automatically show you similar products that other people are looking at. This doesn’t require those ‘other people’ to enter their information separately, nor does it require you to enter any more information than the keywords you used to search for the said product in the first place.

When you are on a Web3 platform, easy participation comes via different methods, but it comes nonetheless. For example, if you’re buying into a cryptocurrency, you automatically become an active member of the community and the act of purchasing the currency itself becomes an activity towards the growth of the community. On the other hand, you can use smart contracts to make sure that the members’ activities are conducive to other members as well as the platform’s growth.

Edit, And Let Edit

If you’ve ever tried to ‘make’ a website on WordPress, you’ll realize that there are two ways to go about it on the platform. The first method is where you land at a blank page and start filling it in with colors, tabs, buttons, text, images, and everything else that makes a web page, a web page.

On the other hand, you have presets that you can use as a foundation of your website and then edit to suit your needs. Of course, you end up with quite a large task in both scenarios. However, having that direction of the second method makes the same task that much less daunting. Similarly, if you let members edit a few templates on your platform in order to make posts, you will see a lot more engagement than you would with just a blank page. So, make it easier for your people, and your people will reward you with engagement!

The best example of this with context to Web3 is its feature of being open source, which enables composability. This in turn makes it that much easier for creators to create their own communities. They can build based on a structure that’s been tried and tested, and the potential that Web3 communities have to quickly rise in value incentivizes skilled people to join and contribute from the community’s inception.

For instance, on November 8, 2021, the popular Ethereum Name Service protocol (ENS) airdropped its new DAO token, four years after its launch. Holders who were early adopters were rewarded an instant five-figure payday, as covered by many, including CoinTeleraph’s Jordan Finneseth.

Incentivize And Reward In Moderation

Incentivizing people will almost always work, regardless of whether it is online, offline, or in a different plane of existence altogether. Moreover, the knowledge of a reward will attract more and more people to join and contribute as well.

These incentives, or rewards, can be in the form of anything. A lot of video games rank their players based on their progress and skill level in the game, while a lot of digital wallets will give you monetary rewards like a cashback and discount vouchers. So, literally anything that can provide gratification to the user can be used as a reward.

Tokens and crypto make for the perfect incentives in Web3 communities. Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

That being said, you need to make sure that your rewards are highly regulated. Otherwise, the 1% of superusers will dominate this part of the community as well, making it very difficult for the average user to claim any reward. This could make them remain inactive members or leave the platform entirely.

Unlike Web2 platforms, incentivization becomes second nature for any community that functions on Web3. Since one of the foundational aspects of Web3 is token economics, it mostly already functions on the idea of rewarding and/or incentivizing the community members. However, the choice of rewarding your members with equity or tokens of different strengths (governance, utility, security, NFTs) makes it much more rewarding and attractive to the members.

While there’s not much anyone can do to make participation equality go away completely, there is an opportunity to alter the percentages. Building your community and platform on Web3 practically ensures that this equation will change at least to some extent, which is a great start to creating an interactive community.

By coto Community Team

Click here to can apply to the ‘coto’ Community Creator Program.

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

Join our community on Discord