Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect

Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is often very hard for people to conceptualize how these user generated sites work- there is no “average user” to imagine yourself as.

(Basically paraphrasing from Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody)

Chris Dixon (or perhaps really Clay Shirky) nails of the of the reasons why the mass media and general population can’t fathom how UGC sites work. But, there’s another dynamic at work too… Very often, when a journalist digs in to discover who are the most prolific contributors to UGC sites, they often find teenage tech geeks manning the helm. Their age and their lack of classically-defined expertise and credentials dismays casual observers, yet I see this as a more pure form of meritocracy than any classical hierarchy like academia or org chart.