That 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 i

That 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."