Maybe this will echo out into the empty universe, but I thought I would mention a point that I think skews your data and conclusion. My hypothesis is that the reason you are seeing what seems to confirm the stated rule, is that it is the "1%" (edit: it is likely actually some subsection of the 1%) that controls access and creates immense barriers and a hostile environment for participation. I theorize too that the reason you are seeing an even lower (0.8%) creator rate, is that this forum even more than some of the bigger forums, polices and controls access even more than common.
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
You could make the opposite argument by picking the other number (8%), which would be a very high rate. So the independent variable here is how you choose to see it.
The other problem is that if the 1% Rule has any validity, then this is true of the internet in general, so you can't really meaningfully single out HN. I agree that finding communities that deviate from the rule would be interesting, if they weren't super small. (Super small communities are interesting for other reasons.)
By the way, if you saw the number of times we email people out of the blue about their HN submissions, offering them help with making them more interesting to the community, or simply letting them know that we were re-upping their post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), you might feel a bit less like this place is corrupt and so on. Optimizing for curiosity is the way we try to manage HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.