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by baron_harkonnen 1747 days ago
> Maybe I'm the outlier

A good sanity check of this is to use Dunbar's number (usually considered at ~150)[0] and see how many of your friends and friends of friends have a number of social media "friends" that reaches or exceeds that number.

In case you are unfamiliar: Dunbar's number is a proposed cognitive limit to the number of real social relationships we can have based on brain size.

The total number of real, stable social relationships you can have is physiologically limited, so having 200 facebook "friends" that truly are your friends is impossible.

Because we do have connections with people outside of social media (hopefully!) even 150 friends is nearly impossible unless you are friends with literally every social relationship you have.

So if you want to see, I would first establish that you are really in the group you think you are. If you are only connected with true, irl friends you likely don't have much more than 30 "friends". Then sample the graph of that network a bit and see where you are in the distribution of "friends".

0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

1 comments

I have roughly 70-80 social media friends, discounting Twitter which I don't engage with my friends at all but instead engage with other computer science, mathematics, physics and beer enthusiasts. These are people having similar interests to me, but they're not my friends. Sort of like HN - you can think of HN as a professional community where we all have like interests, but we're not friends. Like this conversation, we're just strangers who've met and are talking for a brief moment.