Taylor & More: The 90-9-1 Social Media Rule
An EXCERPT from a great Fast Company piece (about Taylor Swift’s Tour and Social Media and Real Life) that you and I would do well to remember moving forward together —
Online narratives distort real life more often than you might realize.
Research consistently shows that a small minority of people who have social media accounts post the vast majority of content.
In what’s termed the “90-9-1 rule,” 90% of users on these websites only “lurk” or read content, 9% reply or repost with occasional new contributions, and only 1% frequently create new content.
Pioneered by Jakob Neilson, the 90-9-1 rule is one of many theorieswithin internet studies that describe participation rates, and different scholars find support for different variations of this rule. Reddit, for example, has a billion-plus monthly active users, but according to a 2017 conference paper, an overwhelming majority of Reddit users are lurkers. X, the website and app formerly known as Twitter, had around 350 million users as of 2023; however, research from 2019 found that 75% of its users were lurkers.
In other words, most of the discussions happening on websites like Reddit and Twitter come from a vocal minority of users—whose posts are then curated and boosted by algorithms.
Nonetheless, in the past decade, the news media have increasingly constructed narratives about collective reality based on what happens on these websites.
joescheets 