Category Archives: Complexity

Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You On Average

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The Friendship Paradox

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.

But wait, there’s more..

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. (And this also may relate to why in large complex communities personalized moderation works better than community moderation, as explored in my last blog post).

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.

What are the dangers of overload?

Those users who become overloaded, measured by receiving far more incoming messages than they send out, are contending with more tweets than they can handle. Controlling for activity, they are more likely to participate in viral cascades, likely due to receiving the popular cascades multiple times. Any individual tweet’s visibility is greatly diluted for overloaded users, because overloaded users receive so many more tweets than they can handle. Because of the connection between cognitive load and managing information overload, the present results suggest that users will dynamically adjust their social network to maintain some optimal individual level of information flux. (What does this mean for Facebook’s growth?)

Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You – Nathan O. Hodas, Farshad Kooti, Kristina Lerman (PDF of the paper)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3480

Do British Gas employees all sing from the same hymn book?

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I used the British Gas contact form to email to ask for my electricity direct debit to be retained at £38 on Friday.

I received a reply saying why British Gas was recommended that I increase to £76, but noted that the retention at £38 debit was an option.

I replied asking to retain the £38 debit.

The reply from the same customer service rep then rejected my request and stated that the new level was to be implemented at £76.

I then called customer service from a pub round the corner from Old Bond Street on Saturday afternoon, round the corner from where Margaret Thatcher was staying at the Ritz, and spoke to a new rep and asked for the £38 rate, and this was agreed.

I then received an email from confirming the £38 debit on my request. I followed a link asking for my experience of customer service, and included this account and noted that there appeared to be an issue, that the system for fixing direct debits is inconsistently understood by British Gas customer service representatives.just before midnight on Sunday a new email popped into my Inbox.

This one said that now British Gas was fixing the rate at £65. I emailed back a complaint this time and asked for compensation, explained all the previous again, and went to sleep. I awoke to a new email confirming the complaint had been received.

Then Tuesday morning, a new email from customer services to say while they really preferred the £65 direct debit that they would fix my monthly rate at £38, and credited my account with £10! I checked my account page and this was confirmed, though it also included a handy graphic in bright red which showed how much I would be in debit if I consumed at the rate of the previous bill.

Yes, I thought, but I immediately paid the previous debit balance on presentation of the bill. This fact obviously does not register, as it’s not part of the ‘system’, even though you can in theory fix your direct debit at whatever rate you like, this is not taken into account.

Because at the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a customer-centric system, it’s a direct debit system, and it’s set up for British Gas’s benefit, not yours.

PS: A few days later someone from British Gas rang me asking for ‘Roy’. I asked what number, and they gave my mobile number. I said there was no ‘Roy’ on this number. Hey, so I can take a hint. So time to switch back to E.ON who had the good grace to send me a small cheque a couple of months ago.