Volunteerism & Internet

I was at dinner with my girlfriend and she picked the restaurant based on a TikTok video. We couldn’t decide what we wanted from the menu, so we looked at the reviews on Google to see what dishes other people recommended. After we picked our food, I started to think about how much volunteerism there is on the internet. A lot of the participation on the internet is thankless and without reward. This participation can take the form of a rating, review, reddit post or a comment. Of course, some people are paid to promote, or make content, but that participation by us the viewers isn’t necessary. In the grand scheme, there is no benefit to this additional involvement, one’s life may not improve at all for leaving that message or comment. However, if I hadn’t seen all the reviews raving about chicken wings at that restaurant, I wouldn’t have skipped out on some of the best chicken wings I’ve had. There have been many times I found the comments as entertaining as the videos themselves or learned something cool from a random Reddit post someone made. I think that aspect of the internet is super cool.

I mentioned this to some of my lab mates and one of them brought up the 1% rule (The Wikipedia Article). This rule states that in an internet community, 1% create new content, 9% participate in changing or updating the content and 90% consume the content. It’s crazy to think about how much influence the 10% of people creating content and leaving comments/reviews can have on the rest of the 90%.