2 ms·

I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I th

I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I think this summarizes my feeling towards social media, entirely. I think it helps to explain why a lot of people can be simultaneously very well off (compared to, say, the USA in 1990), yet completely dissatisfied with their lives.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1% Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors". Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.

2 ms·

I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I th

by thechao 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1% Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors". Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.