> Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people. Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I

> Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people. Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I respect you, and you respect your boss. That does not mean I must respect your boss, maybe he lost to me in poker and I laugh at him. Even when it comes to social networks, when researchers visualise what's happening on twitter, they don't a hierarchy, they use a graph. Social network analysis uses graph theory. Even a family tree is not a hierarchy, and not a tree. Ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph.