Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You

Understand

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.