
A social-network illusion that makes things appear more popular than they are - dnetesn
http://phys.org/news/2015-07-social-network-illusion-popular.html
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pcunite
Excellent paper.

TL;DR Majority illusion paradox occurs when many people are observing a small
and loud group "saying" something that is actually globally rare. Imagine 100
people who all observe three people who say the same things.

Own a media company and get people to believe in junk. Find the most connected
individuals among a group and make them "active". If an "inactive" person
perceives .5 of their connections are active they may switch to the active
state themselves.

The "type" of network can affect the perceptions.

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SilasX
Isn't that basically the phenomenon that all PR evangelists use to get an idea
out?

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pcunite
Well, you can "say" something over a channel but that does not "create" the
perception that it is popular. So, this paper describes how things are
perceived as popular when they are not really popular in a "numerical" sense.
When Johnny says "everyone" is doing it, what he means is that all of the
people he listens too are saying that "everyone" is doing it. In fact, only 2
people are doing it.

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downandout
This is really interesting. My interpretation of this, in practical terms, is
that if one were to pay two celebrities to Tweet or make Instagram posts, the
optimal strategy would be to find the pair that has the highest overlapping
group of followers. It would be interesting to see if this would increase
virality enough to justify the additional costs.

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raziel2701
It's annoying how the article does not properly say what institution the
research comes from in the very first line.

They attribute it to the University of California which consists of ten
different campuses and typically Berkeley gets away with being called just
University of California, or CAL, because it was the first.

However upon looking up the researchers' name it turns out that they belong to
none of these and are actually from the University of Southern California.

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ci5er
I don't understand your point here. Is it that you don't like the sloppy
journalism at phys.org? Or that you don't want to bother with reading pre-
prints from researchers at schools that aren't Berkeley?

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archgoon
What? Of course it's sloppy journalism. Stating who did the research is
important. It's less important in this situation since they link to the actual
paper, but it's one of the first things you want to know when you do a report
(Who, what, where...). Being incomplete is bad enough, getting it outright
wrong is even worse.

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charlesray
Permanently sticky this to Reddit so they stop thinking they're a
representative sample of the population at large.

~~~
readme
Which of the private subreddits do you suggest they post it to :)?

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DougN7
Now imagine the power search engines have when they decide what content/news
stories to show you. They could (have??) sway elections.

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themgt
I'm more curious about, it's known that Facebook uses algorithms to display
content based, in part on the popularity of that type/user's history of
content popularity.

So to what extent does that create a self-fulfilling prophecy where people who
tend to post content generally likable to their friends then have that content
displayed around and liked more, having a self-reinforcing effect on how
Facebook "feels" and how people understand what they are expected to post to
Facebook.

Sort of a fast-foodization of thought?

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cbd1984
“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.
Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in
a theater I can feel them.” — Pauline Kael (this is what she actually said)
[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-
Fac...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Factoid-That-
Refuses-to-Die)

This is why Nate Silver, who after all mostly does his work by taking polls as
a whole seriously, continues to surprise some people: They live in a bubble.
They don't see who the majority is actually supporting. They are actually
surprised by election results, even if the polls have largely been pointing
one direction consistently for months on end.

(Silver ignores some polls and applies correction factors to others. This is
due to those polls' demonstrable idiocy and/or bias, as empirically
demonstrated by how far they are from reality when the _real_ events happen.)

Wang does pretty well, too, and his models are simpler:
[http://election.princeton.edu/](http://election.princeton.edu/)

My point is, polls work, statistics is real, and numbers remain the primary
way to determine which of two things is larger. Enter echo chambers if you
want to, but don't live in one.

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msvan
I don't understand why this is called an illusion. How about just counting the
edges as a measure of popularity? Surely nothing "appears to be more popular"
than it is -- if there are more outgoing edges to other nodes, it _is_ more
popular. Popularity has always been about popular people.

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reagency
Because each node's view of neighboring nodes is a biased sample of the global
data set.

A related example: the average person is less popular than their average
friend, and therefore feels that they are below average popularity. This
happens since popular people are weighted more heavily in the sampling, but
people don't realize they are confusing the local average with global average.

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amelius
Perhaps social networks should compensate for this effect, and show us the
real world instead of a hyped world.

I'm not sure if facebook would be willing to do this, but perhaps GNU social?

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kansface
What are you suggesting specifically?

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amelius
If some item is shared (or liked) there is a probability p that you will see
it on your newsfeed.

This probability p should be a function of the popularity r (in your circles)
directly, and it should not depend on who is sharing the item.

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oldmanjay
this has seemed obvious to me since I first got on computer networks in the
80s. it's nice to have my intuition be scientifically validated. I don't think
there will be much impact from this on a human level, though. maybe some
marketers who didn't really see the formula before will benefit.

