"We assume that in social networks, when people connect to other people who are lower in the hierarchy, this causes them *social agony*."
From this WWW paper: wwwconference.org/proceedings/ww
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Despite the amusing concept of 'social agony', this is an excellent paper. Among other things, it formalises social stratification in a network analysis setting.
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Case in point: Node 3 (top one) in Figure 2b is having a very agonising time, due to their link to a low level plebeian... I love this idea.
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How would "lower in the hierarchy" apply to Twitter users? Verified vs. non-verified? Number of followers?
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Good question. I’ll check the paper later but I believe edges are follower ties in this paper. So lower would be accounts who don’t have any high-follower accounts following them. They’re leaf nodes at bottom of the tree (well not exactly a tree as there’s some cycles but yeah)
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What I found initially compelling was this idea that it causes agony for influentials at the top of the hierarchy to link to low hierarchy individuals. Like if followed a regular Joe, it’s like: why? And somehow this is socially agonizing for l!
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That's really fascinating. My hypothesis is that the act of verification (as done by Twitter) sets up a sense of exclusiveness and causes a weird "appeal to authority" behavior by many regular users towards verified users.
The problem with verification is that it isn't open ...
... to anyone. It's not so much verification as a badge Twitter gives to accounts that are socially influential in some way (while missing many important users who are just as influential).
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I like this hypothesis! It could easily be tested with this framework. Higher strays correlated with verified status?
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I definitely think it is worth looking into. Also feel free to DM me for some data source possibilities that I can't openly share here.
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