The page you linked directly contradicts your interpretation:
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1% principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012 suggested that only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content.[9] Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some form.
This sort of "1% rule" claim, and other versions of it made by others who have replied, is not a possible counterargument to my claim. Moreover, behavior isn't the same as desire. It's ridiculous to say that Trump didn't want a second term as president just because he didn't get one, and it's not less ridiculous to say that a person doesn't want to post content on the internet just because they didn't post content on your website.
But more fundamentally it goes nowhere towards the "be part of a conversation" bit. "People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation" means that, while it is true of people in general, it is truer of people who post content. The people who post content want dialogue, so they're going to post where they can get feedback. They don't want to just speak into a void. The rest of my comment can only have made sense if it was a general truth and its application to those who actually create internet content (even just a small throwaway comment like this).
Your kind of argument simply doesn't explain the death of the private website and the growth of social networks. It also doesn't explain why what grew up is interactive networks, not news aggregators.
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1% principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012 suggested that only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content.[9] Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some form.
This sort of "1% rule" claim, and other versions of it made by others who have replied, is not a possible counterargument to my claim. Moreover, behavior isn't the same as desire. It's ridiculous to say that Trump didn't want a second term as president just because he didn't get one, and it's not less ridiculous to say that a person doesn't want to post content on the internet just because they didn't post content on your website.
But more fundamentally it goes nowhere towards the "be part of a conversation" bit. "People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation" means that, while it is true of people in general, it is truer of people who post content. The people who post content want dialogue, so they're going to post where they can get feedback. They don't want to just speak into a void. The rest of my comment can only have made sense if it was a general truth and its application to those who actually create internet content (even just a small throwaway comment like this).
Your kind of argument simply doesn't explain the death of the private website and the growth of social networks. It also doesn't explain why what grew up is interactive networks, not news aggregators.