Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You
Nathan O. Hodas USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292、Farshad Kooti USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292、Kristina Lerman USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Abstract
Feld’s friendship paradox states that “your friends have more friends than you, on average.” This paradox arises because extremely popular people, despite being rare, are overrepresented when averaging over friends. Using a sample of the Twitter firehose, we confirm that the friendship paradox holds for >98% of Twitter users. Because of the directed nature of the follower graph on Twitter, we are further able to confirm more detailed forms of the friendship paradox: everyone you follow or who follows you has more friends and followers than you. This is likely caused by a correlation we demonstrate between Twitter activity, number of friends, and number of followers. In addition, we discover two new paradoxes: the virality paradox that states “your friends receive more viral content than you, on average,” and the activity paradox, which states “your friends are more active than you, on average.” The latter paradox is important in regulating online communication. It may result in users having difficulty maintaining optimal incoming information rates, because following additional users causes the volume of incoming tweets to increase super-linearly. While users may compensate for incr
中文速览
社交网络里流传着一句话：你的朋友比你更受欢迎——这就是"友谊悖论"(Friendship Paradox)。这项研究以Twitter数百万用户的真实数据为基础，不仅证实了这一经典悖论在超过98%的Twitter用户身上成立，还发现了两个全新的悖论：你的好友平均比你更活跃（活跃度悖论），也比你传播更多病毒式内容（病毒性悖论）。研究进一步揭示，正是因为你关注的人普遍比你活跃，当你多关注一个人时，涌入的信息量会超线性增长，很容易将你推入"信息过载"状态；而一旦过载，用户反而对小规模、低热度的内容更不敏感，更容易错过那些尚未爆发的信息苗头。这项发现不只是统计上的趣闻，它揭示了社交媒体用户在管理关注列表时面临的认知瓶颈，对理解信息传播、注意力分配乃至流行病预警都具有现实意义。
原文 arXiv:1304.3480;中英对照 + 大白话阅读 https://aha.fim.ai/paper/1304.3480v1