Fight the Power (Law)

The Purefold presentations constantly refer to a social media power law — one that resembles (and might just be) the Power Law of Participation described here. The law (really a simplification of complex trends) says that in any community:

• 90% are passive observers — lurkers, subscribers and occasional commenters in online communities.
• 9% are active contributors — in online communities, power posters and second tier collaborators.
• 1% are leaders and creators — dedicated creative folks, organizers, people who shepherd long term projects and so on.

This trend is strongly measurable in online communities because each level of participation leaves a different electronic footprint, but it applies outside of the Web. You’ll always have the communicators and obsessives at the heart of a scene, at least as a common reference point for quieter, more casual folks.

It’s easy to interpret the power law in a misanthropic way. You might say the 90% is a pack of people who won’t take control of their own subcultures, or that the 10% are obsessive dweebs.  That’s the wrong way to go about it. People who lurk in one scene might be powerful participants in another. The number of communities we belong to usually outstrips our capacity to take active roles in them all.

Mover, Shaker . . . Shoveler

It’s in a social media guru’s interests to pretend that the influential tenth represents everyone else. If I (as a Social Media Guy) influence 10 people to agree with me, that’s really 100 — or even 1000, if they’re in the 1% of leaders! I don’t have to bother doing difficult research if I pretend that every loudmouth is backed up by at least 10 quiet allies.

It helps that the vocal 10% want to believe it too; they want to be important. So we’re all in it together, perpetuating this heap of bullshit.

Unfortunately, while the ultra-visible 10% can organize consent to their opinions from the 90%, they do not necessarily represent them. In any community with a low investment (fans of a band, forum members) the majority may have very strong opinions about the topic, but just don’t care about sharing or promoting it. It might be hard for that 10% to understand how holding an opinion doesn’t lead to the urge to share it and as mentioned before, there’s a natural tendency for joiners to want joining and acting to count for something and persuasively represent the whole. And it is so very tempting to take communities at face value so you can work less and believe in their positive feedback.

Surely, nobody wants to hear that they should distrust the Vocal Tenth and take what it says with a grain of salt, but I’m still going to say it.

A Little Something for Everybody Else

If you’re making games, telling stories and generally getting creative on stuff for a mass audience it’s not your job to obey the Vocal Tenth. Don’t create through regurgitation; if that’s what you’re doing, nobody needs you. Quit. You don’t need to be an original precious flower, but there should be that extra thing holding it all together.

To put community feedback in perspective you absolutely need this kind of creative integrity. Part of your job is to protect it and the majority from the Vocal Tenth.  Otherwise, the Tenth undermines your efforts with:

• The desire to be experts, which leads to making shit up, whether it be in the form of conscious fanon or something that’s just wrong, but repeatedly stated by someone who won’t shut up.
• Criticism that dismisses something you think probably serves a less vocal segment of the audience — often, one discouraged by the Vocal Tenth from participating.
• Emphasis on open participation and structural issues over a strong, holistic creative direction. Things are more accessible once you break them into modular chunks, but the stuff made from those chunks tends to be dull or ugly.

. . . and other problems. The Vocal Tenth has a tendency to grab stuff and run with it to the point of undermining your original vision and alienating the other nine-tenths.

Creative stewardship means giving the majority of your audience license to have opinions at odds with the ones people broadcast, and exploring lines of development implied by your work whether or not they come preapproved by the Tenth. It’s also about developing your work as a leader, not a servant. People talk as if they want and shout outs and other forms of deference, but that’s only going to reflect what they’ve already brought to your work. Why are you doing something they can do themselves?

(I see this kind of thing in tabletop RPGs all the time, when some fan says “I can’t possibly play this game because they didn’t include this idea that I spent several months developing and several hours describing, because it would be too hard to do it without official support.” Really?)

Ultimately your audience wants new ideas they wouldn’t develop themselves. It’s risky — you can choose something that sucks — but regurgitating community consensus will always lose, given time. You’re not adding anything original, and that hollow lack of direction won’t go unnoticed. The danger here is that the Vocal Tenth love this. Their constituents like having the official stamp of approval, and as diehard fans it takes them longer to get bored with autocannibalism.

Meanwhile, and without raising a fuss, everybody else abandons your project. They don’t lurk on your site. They stop buying your books. Whatever. While you’re partying it up with the Tenth, nobody else cares any more. You lose. Isn’t pleasing your network fun?

If you want to keep your entire audience around, here’s what I recommend:

• Stick to your vision. If you don’t demonstrate forward looking leadership and simply react to reactions, your IP will eventually sink under the weight of mutually referential garbage.
• Define participation. Develop a canon policy and degrees of recognition that create one vision for the community to form around, but doesn’t discourage fan works.
• Question consensus. When the Vocal Tenth settles on an idea, privately explore its downsides and publicly give yourself room to maneuver no matter what the “true fans” decide. Sometimes, you may settle on something similar to what they’re talking about, but it should never be because that’s what they’re talking about.
• Seek alternative sources of feedback. The Vocal Tenth is a limited slice of your total audience. You need information from other sources, from face to face encounters to reliable research. Looking outside the hard core’s demographics is critical, otherwise you might get lured into appearing racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.
• Recruit, acknowledge, reward. Don’t take what I’ve said to be a straight out dismissal of your most vocal fans. Be guarded, but provide a thoughtful place for their contributions. Get them on your side. Send them cool stuff. They do have pull, even if (as I said earlier) majority consent isn’t the same as vigorous agreement.

Nowadays we have a few tools to measure near-total interest that anyone can use, at least for rough estimates. Silent Majority or Vocal Tenth, everybody Googles, so Google Trends is a handy way to make comparisons. Check out the difference between Vampire RPG brands, for example. Whatever you do, remember that you can’t go wrong by following through on your original ideas with dedicated craftsmanship. Your success is always bound by the quality of your core effort. Nine-tenths or one, everybody knows when you cut corners, and they’ll turn their attention elsewhere.