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I always think of the ratio of 90% consume, 9% contribute, and 1% create. This is a phenomenon on wikipedia, GitHub, twitter, and other places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

The big question is...what side do you want to be on?



On larger platforms, the ratio is probably far closer to 90%, 9.85%, 0.15%.

I've seen this ratio at Google+[1] and again on a recently-shuttered Diaspora instance (520 MUAs of 350k total profiles).

There's a very strong power law between the number of presentations of content and the number of accounts reaching that level.

Facebook sees ~5 billion-with-a-b "pieces" of content (I'm presuming these are posts, comments, images, or videos, though given other engagement-inflation, might and quite possibly do also include likes or reshares), per day. The top daily shares ... are typically in the millions-to-tens-of-millions range.[2] This is also typical of any winner-takes-all metric and follows from the inherent limits of population attention and time. Social media seems to occupy ~45 minutes/day for many people, and if you start dividing out 2,700 seconds among messages, there are only so many messages a typical person can read or view in a day: 10 is 270s (4.5 minutes) each, 100 is 27 seconds, 1,000 is 2.7 seconds. I suspect for most people, the number is in the 10--50 range.

It's not so much whether or not you want to be a producer or consumer. It's whether or not the channel is providing relevant, useful, accurate, and actionable information. For the most part, social media probably doesn't.

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Notes:

1. See: https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the... That's based on a 500k+ true random sample of profiles, and is based on my own earlier work based on 50k+ randomly-sampled profiles.

2. There are a few "most popular on Facebook" sites which track the top shares for a given day. I'm not aware of specific systematic tracking over time, though that of course all but certainly exists.


Nothing gets you high like creating.




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