Why are Forum & Blog Members Not More Active?

At a domain-name forum it was asked why so many members lurk on the sidelines and are not actively posting. I believe there are several reasons for blog and forum lurkers not posting more…

It goes with the territory even in a good market but a bad market (like we are obviously in today) makes it worse. Most folks simply do not like posting for whatever reason. There is an old adage 90% of the activity is from 10% of the members and that’s true in any business.

The lack of posts at blogs is also poor, i.e. this blog gets 100-200 visitors a day on average but comments and posts by others are not too common, as is also the situation at many other blogs too.

Some website and domain-name forum members may lurk because they feel like they are relatively minor players vs the heavy hitters so why bother to post? They may also think what they have to say is already well known so would not be welcome. 

I have seen that happen personally at a forum board when I asked a question about a subject only to have an Admin chime-in by saying that has already been much discussed here (often via my other posts) so no need to discuss the subject again. What made that incident so ironic is one of the reasons I posted about the issue was to help the forum and bring some activity to it, which forum was very slow and boring at the time. As an interesting side-note I can say that board appears to be even less active with lower public participation today.

Something similar recently happened personally to me at one of the popular forum boards where I was flamed a bit because a veteran member said instead of posting a question about an issue there I should Google for the information instead.

What is so interesting about him saying that is if we all followed his (unwelcome and ridiculous) advice far less issues would be posted and discussed at the forums and blogs (resulting in less blog and forum activity) since the information would have already been researched via a search engine.  How ironic is that anyway.

There is also a less obvious (but nevertheless real issue) of some members being somewhat depressed by reading about all the big sales (some for millions of $) taking place (mostly involving dictionary one-worders the average member do not have the luxury of owning) but they can’t get sales themselves and are also negative due to the ongoing declines in revenue, resulting in portfolios being trimmed a lot, often the result of high carrying costs vs lower income.