[woodall]

>A similar phenomenon occurs in social network rankings: For any given person with a reasonable number of Facebook friends, their friends will be, on average, more popular than the original person (popularity defined by number of friends). Almost everyone is one of the least popular people in their own social network.

Is there a name for this phenomenon? Or supplemental reading material?

[etruong42]

If we don't consider what made a person "popular", ie have many friends, this "phenomenon" just makes statistical sense to me. You have a greater chance of being in a pool of friends that is large, while your pool of Facebook friends is smaller, so out of that smaller pool you have less of a chance of one of them being less popular than you. It is already unlikely that unpopular people are one of your Facebook friends because they themselves have so few friends.

I have no mathematical proof; this is merely what I intuit.