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February 19, 2004
Lots on lurking
Posted by Clay Shirky
Eugene Kim seems to have kicked off a wide-ranging discussion on lurking with his simple question --
Are Lurkers Bad?Lurkers are part of a group's latent energy; good things happen when that energy is activated. Lurkers are part of the all-important weak-tie network, and it's important to keep them engaged, even if engagement does not translate to participation. However, having lots of lurkers as a community goes through its nascent "sausage stage" can hurt if it drives lurkers and other potential participants away.
Here's another question: Are lurkers members of a community? This question is left as an exercise to the reader.
(NB: It's a short post, and I've quoted most of it here.)
This prompted John Stafford to reply with
The Power of Lurking, with really interesting ideas on the relationship of lurking and scale:
Segmenting the population draws out lurkers (since a "good" lurker normally lacks expertise or motivation -- thus always getting beat by a core member when there is a logical next step -- thus remaining a lurker until chance intersection with an area of great insight or knowledge). [...] I can imagine something like Model UN, where identical topics are debated in small committees and then after prioritization and revision, they are sent to the group as a whole might effectively flush out lurkers. Though I'm unclear how you implement such a thing online without it feeling unproductive (since you are intentionally creating duplication).
Lilia Efimova is also thinking about the nature of lurkers and lurking, and has what must surely be
the motherlode of lurking research lists.
Comments (4)
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1. Lucas on February 19, 2004 4:20 PM writes...
Well, since huge amounts are already said about nothing, lowering the inhibition level of the lurker couldn't worsen the signal to noise ratio all that much. And it might even hasten the development of the post rating/filtering feature that we are/should be waiting for.
Permalink to Comment2. Shannon Clark on February 20, 2004 12:49 AM writes...
Just an observation - every somewhat large scale online group I have ever been a part of over the past 14 years online have had a very high ratio of "lurkers" to posters.
From Usenet to mailing lists to blog sites (using comments as a measure) etc.
Most people don't actively post - they typically read (if/when they have time), may share that information with othes, but only rarely post.
My personal "rule of thumb" is that it generally feels like about 1 to 100 is a common ratio of participants to lurkers, but this is just rough math.
Permalink to Comment3. Stowe Boyd on February 21, 2004 12:33 PM writes...
I was working with Abuzz in 1999 (when they were acquired by the NY Times, and disappeared) and their Beehive product demonstrated that many lurkers were really learners, sitting on the sidelines while those more expert hashed out (through Q&A) whatever was on their agendas. For more see http://stoweboyd.typepad.com/awm/2003/07/social_tools_bu.html)
Permalink to Comment4. Tom Smith on February 27, 2004 10:22 AM writes...
I tried to set up a newsgroup called alt.lurkers... but couldn't be bothered
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