All of Your Friends Are More Popular Than You, According To Math

A recent study proves what you always feared: All of your friends are more popular than you, you are the least popular of all of your friends.

Indeed, new research from PLOS ONE analyzed millions of Twitter users to confirm all of our worst social media paranoia. By looking at millions of Twitter users, they were able to conclude that people are much more likely to follow accounts with more followers.

From the report on their findings:

By inspecting different types of neighbor superiority, we uncovered the hierarchical nature of the connections in the Twitter graph both in terms of connectivity and in terms of nodal qualities. We observed that the fraction of nodes experiencing followee superiority exceeds the fraction of nodes experiencing follower superiority, and this is true for 15 out of 16 types of superiority introduced. This indicates the tendency of most users to follow other users who have higher attributes. It is of note that when we speak of hierarchical structures, there are distinct hierarchies for different attributes.

In other words, if it seems like everyone on your feed is more Twitter famous than you, it's because they probably are, (but at there are also a bunch of less Twitter famous people following you). According to the study, such results reflect a grander trend across social networks (IRL and online) in which "people on average have fewer friends than their friends do." Researchers have labeled this the "generalized friendship paradox," despite the fact that giving the phenomena a name fails to make it even remotely less stressful.

Related: Twitter Might Be Making a Major Change to Its 140-Character Limit