"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
Conversation
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 ...
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... 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).