6 ms·
That's actually quite depressing. "You are always surrounded by people who are more popular than you."
by andrey-p 12y ago
That's actually quite depressing. "You are always surrounded by people who are more popular than you."
- kull 12y ago98% of the time to be more specific
- Groxx 12y agoOn Twitter. I think we can safely assume Twitter is an extreme example.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kstenerud 12y agoActually, I prefer it that way. Let other people deal with the hassle of dealing with people. My greatest fear is discovering too late that something I'm doing will make me famous.
- cyorir 12y agoAlso depressing are some of the corollaries that have cropped up. "On average, you are surrounded by people who are more successful than you." "On average, your (sexual) partners have more partners than you."
- gd1 12y ago>"On average, you are surrounded by people who are more successful than you." How does this one work? It doesn't seem to fit. I'm more likely to be friends with friendly people, more likely to have sex with people who like to have sex, why am I more likely to be around successful people?
- bryanlarsen 12y agoSuccessful people have more friends than average.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- gd1 12y agoThat may well be true, but it isn't really relevant to the paradox. That's a second-order effect which needs to be established statistically, not the paradox itself which is pure graph theory. You're basically saying "You're more likely to be friends with people who make a lot of friends - that is an emergent property of a network. Also, I believe friendliness is correlated with success."
- cyorir 12y agoThis was actually how I first heard of the friendship paradox. There were a number of articles related to this earlier this year; here [0] is one and the original article [1]. Sorry for not linking earlier. [0] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523566/how-the-friendship-paradox-makes-your-friends-better-than-you-are/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523566/how-the-friendsh... [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1458 http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1458
- cjensen 12y agoSpin it the other way and you get "people who are popular want to be your friend."
- codeka 12y agoI don't think it's as bad as that. It's the mean number of friends, not the median. The example of twitter makes this a bit more clear: your followers have more followers, on average, than you. But that's because you likely follow someone with a million followers. That one person greatly affects the mean follower count. So if you follow 10 people, one of whom has 1000 followers, and the rest just have one, the paradox still holds.
- tnorthcutt 12y agoThis comment seems to have downvotes - why? This made the linked paradox click for me, and seems like a good explanation. Is it incorrect?
- catinahat 12y agoand now your comment is in the grey with no explanation. It's absurd how downvote-happy HN's been lately, really kills the conversation...
- simias 12y agoOff topic: I would be curious to get statistics about the evolution of the ratio of downvotes/upvotes the past few years on HN. I also have the sentiment that HNers have been very "downvote-happy" lately, as you put it. I really think downvotes should be rationed in some way (and not just enabled after some karma threshold is reached).
- 6cxs2hd6 12y agoMy new habit: Automatically up-vote every greyed-out comment I encounter. I don't go searching for them, but when I see one, I upvote it without even reading it. I used to read them carefully first, to decide whether I should up-vote. But from that experience, I've learned I almost always should -- the downvotes were rarely warranted, and almost always lazy and brainless. So I may as well save time and cut to the chase -- just upvote. (If enough of us do this, maybe we can minimize the problem HN is seemingly unwilling and/or unable to address.)