I’ve been mulling over an observation that someone made in a discussion forum about community building, whose take was that there is an inverse relationship between a person’s desire to express their opinion and the value of the opinion they express. I’d like to dismiss that as a pessimistic joke, but my sense is that it’s actually quite accurate. Considering what I’ve seen in many forums over the course of the years, it does seem that uninformed people tend to talk quite a lot while those who have an informed perspective are reluctant to participate.
That’s just casual observation, and my sense is that it would be difficult to perform a reliable analysis of the phenomenon because it would require a great deal of data and some rather painstaking analysis to qualify whether each contribution was based on sound knowledge. And it would also be impossible to truly account for the number of people who might have lent expertise to a conversation but chose not to participate.
So instead, I’ve decided to matrix a person’s willingness to participate in a conversation against their ability to contribute something worthwhile, and I do think that it corresponds to some of the behaviors I’ve witnessed, not only in online interactions, but in human interactions in general.
Lurkers (low desire, low expertise)
This group represents a discussion observers who rarely if ever participate. They do not know enough to have an informed opinion, recognize their opinion is uninformed, and have the wisdom to remain silent and listen to the more informed. The lurkers cannot be counted, but considering the number of people who view a discussion thread as opposed to the number of people who contribute, they are likely the majority of users who come to the feast but bring nothing to the table.
I wouldn’t go so far as to declare this group to be undesirable, even though their relationship is largely parasitic. They will occasionally ask a question or probe someone to elaborate, and can be useful in keeping the conversation going. Particularly in knowledge-sharing forums, a substantial number of participants who are hungry for knowledge is central to the mission of the group. It could even be said that the main value of a discussion forum are the lurkers, as a group of experts posting things that everyone else in the group already knows is not doing anyone any good at all.
Neither does it seem like a particularly good idea to stimulate the lurkers into being more active in the group: their need for knowledge is something that they bring, and getting them to speak when they lack knowledge turns them into Disinformers.
Disinformers (high desire, low expertise)
The disinformers are the group that prompted the notion that people who know little enjoy talking much, but their contributions are of low value (and may even be detrimental) due to their lack of subject-matter expertise. If you measure the success of a forum by the level of activity alone, they would seem to be a valuable audience – but given that they annoy others and that anyone who follows their guidance will likely come to regret it, they should likely be regarded as the least valuable audience a community might attract.
I can think of one potential benefit of having disinformers – and admittedly, this is quite a stretch: by offering bad information, a disinformer provokes a response from a participant who has genuine subject matter expertise but is reluctant to participate, who will feel the need to speak up in order to set the record straight.
Consultants (low desire, high expertise)
There are among the lurkers a number of people who do have a significant level of expertise and could be valuable contributors to the group, but who are for whatever reason reluctant to speak. I liken them to consultants because they are only likely to contribute if they are compensated in some way – not necessarily with a monetary payment, but for esteem or recognition of their expertise.
Consultants represent an untapped potential in online communities, and it’s desirable to get them to join the conversation. Aside of offering tokens of esteem such as badges of status or participation (which seems quite silly, but can be effective) or cajoling them into taking an active role of moderator, it seems difficult to get them to step out of the shadows.
Ambassadors (high desire, high expertise)
The most desirable participants for an online community – highly knowledgeable people who are generous with their knowledge and who are motivated by a desire to spread enthusiasm for the subject at hand. This is the audience to pursue, develop, defend, and treasure as they are the value that lurkers seek in a community, and they tend to draw like-minded people to participate, fueling the growth of the community.
However, it does not follow that a community should seek to be solely composed of ambassadors – that leads to the problem described earlier, in which there is no-one in the group that genuinely needs to converse, such that a group of experts has no audience that could benefit from the information they wish to share because everyone to whom they are speaking is already aware of the facts they are sharing.
Caveat: Social Communities
It’s likely that the desirability of knowledgeable participants is particular to knowledge communities – in which the point of participation is to share and gain information germane to a practical skill, be it an occupational or leisure interest – and expertise is significantly less important in social communities, in which the topic of conversation is entirely frivolous.
It’s also likely that the demand for social communities is largely satisfied by the large general-interest communities of Facebook and Twitter, in which people interact with a purely social interest – as a convenient way to maintain contact with people they already know in their offline lives. An engaging conversationalist in social communities doesn’t necessarily need to have anything of value to say, just the ability to make pleasant conversation, as no-one seems to want or expect anything practical.
At the same time there is a significant and underexploited market for specific professional and leisure interest. Arguably, LinkedIn has attempted to provide forums for occupational conversation, but non-occupational interest groups seem to be disperse and difficult to locate. Whether this is fertile ground for expansion or merely an idea that hasn't worked out at all is subject to some debate.
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