Six Degrees of Separation

Discussions focus on the concept of six degrees of separation in social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, exploring how platforms infer connections via social graphs, friends of friends, and network effects.

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Keywords

FB twitter.com IM LinkedIn NOT i.e API wikipedia.org friends connections separation social degrees graph contacts friend follows network

Sample Comments

late2part Dec 28, 2015 View on HN

What % of people on LinkedIn are NOT within 3 degrees of separation from you?

m_ke Feb 28, 2012 View on HN

I'm guessing how friends/followers are connected. Whole 6 degrees of separation idea

known Apr 16, 2017 View on HN

May be due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

brown9-2 Sep 30, 2009 View on HN

How do they tie this to your "social graph"?

access_denied Jan 30, 2010 View on HN

You know that saying "everyone knows everybody over 6 other people", maybe something about that. Or: who of your friend's friend's friend's has the same hobby / whatever.

anxiousest Aug 24, 2013 View on HN

Usually via graph, a "six degrees of separation" sort of thing, you don't have to directly contact each other, but it's enough to contact some of the same people to assume a connection. Also similar use patterns or geo locations (ip location or profile input indicating physical proximity) can be taken into account. I don't have intimate knowledge of their algorithms so I don't know about any other factors they might use.I find it quite amusing that you're &q

taeric Apr 29, 2014 View on HN

More likely you are just seeing a fairly common network effect, where once you are in it is easy to see many connections.So, if there are some fairly good quantitative treatments of this, I'd be interested. I suspect it isn't too shocking. Probably more than the parent poster and friends think. Probably less than you do. :)

Natsu Oct 6, 2015 View on HN

Another possibility is that your social graph might have more overlap than you realize, even if it's not very much, it could be enough to make them the 'nearest' to you in some way. At least some of the graph data can come from sources invisible to you (i.e. people looking at other people's Facebook connections).

hatsunearu Aug 19, 2021 View on HN

How do they know whose friends are friends with whoever else?

Is hiding my friends less creepy than trawling through my friends, friends' friends, friends' friends' friends, and so on?