Most people have fewer friends than
their friends have, on average.
Prove it.
I was curious what the statistics were for facebook, and I found this article from 3 years ago, when Facebook had 721,000,000 active users and 69 billion friendships.
The article says, in part:
"A classic paradox regarding social networks dictates that, for most people, the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count.
On Facebook, that’s the case for 84% of our users. Why? Scott Feld wrote about this phenomenon in his 1991 paper
Why Your Friends Have More Friends than You Do, showing that the same phenomenon dictates that college students typically find that their classes to be larger than the average class size, and that when sitting on an airplane, it will typically be more crowded than the average occupancy. These effects all arise because for people, classes, and flights to be popular, you must be much more likely to choose them. So you shouldn’t feel bad if it seems like all your friends are more popular than you: it appears this way to most of us."
n = 721,000,000
