February 18, 2006
It doesn't take much
Bradley Horowitz, whom I admire for being a staunch Alameda advocate, inaugurates his blog with a post on Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers, which includes the thesis, "we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users."
I've spent the last 30 minutes trying to find any writing of mine that echoed this, because when I worked at Epinions, I realized this. When Epinions launched, we were hell-bent on getting *every* user to write reviews. Over time we realized that a) that would never happen and b) it wasn't necessary. We ballparked it at about 5% of our audience wrote reviews, and that was fine. It seems that I never wrote about it, though. Anyway, it seems as if that pattern continues to play out, as Bradley's post suggests.
