Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You

Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You. Hodas, N. O., Kooti, F., & Lerman, K. In Proceedings of the 7Th International AAAI Conference On Weblogs And Social Media (ICWSM), 2013. Honorable mention paper

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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 >0.98 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 increased information flow by increasing their own activity, users become information overloaded when they receive more information than they are able or willing to process. We compare the average size of cascades that are sent and received by overloaded and underloaded users. And we show that overloaded users post and receive larger cascades and they are poor detector of small cascades.

@inproceedings{Hodas13icwsm,
    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 >0.98 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 increased
    information flow by increasing their own activity, users become information
    overloaded when they receive more information than they are able or
    willing to process. We compare the average size of cascades that are sent and
    received by overloaded and underloaded users. And we show that overloaded users
    post and receive larger cascades and they are poor detector of small cascades.},
    author = {Nathan O. Hodas and Farshad Kooti and Kristina Lerman},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7Th International AAAI Conference On Weblogs And Social Media (ICWSM)},
    keywords = {social-networks},
    title = {Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You},
    year = {2013},
    url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3480},
    urlBlog={http://crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=7618},
    urlPresentation = {http://prezi.com/18rmya6ucitr/friendship-paradox-redux-icwsm-2013/},
    note={Honorable mention paper}
}

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