“The truth is, the Internet is littered with underperforming, barely populated, or completely abandoned collaboration spaces: wikis that have no contributors, discussion forums with no comments, open-source projets with no active users, social networks with barely a few members, and Facebook groups with plenty of members but few who ever do anything after joining. According to Shirky, more than half of all collaborative projects online fail to achieve the minimum number of participants necessary to begin working on their goal, let alone achieve it…
For one thing, some participatory networks are more rewarding than others – and the most readily rewarding networks, aren’t as a rule, the one ones doing serious work. Online games and ‘fun’ social networks like Facebook provide the steadiest stream of intrinsic rewards. Their autotelic spaces – spaces we visit for the pure enjoyment of it. Their primary purpose is to be rewarding, not to solve a problem or get work done. Unlike serious projects, they are engineered first and foremost to engage and satisfy our emotional cravings. And as a result, they are the projects that are absorbing the vast majority of our online participation bandwidth – our individual and collective capacity to contribute to one or more participatory networks…
The problem is likely to going to get worse before it gets better. As it becomes easier and cheaper to launch a participation network, it will like become equally difficult to sustain it. There are only so many potential participants on the Internet. And as long as participation is designed as an active process requiring some mental effort, there are only so many units of engagement, or mental hours, each participant can reasonably expend in a given hour, day, week, or month.
To effectively harness the wisdom of crowds, and to successfully leverage the participation of many, organizations will need to become effective players in an emerging engagement economy. In the economy of engagement, it is less important to compte for attention and more important to compete for things like brain cycles and interactive bandwidth.”
From Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal.
