Most of your friends have more friends than you do. How can that be true for everyone?
Sociologist Scott Feld found that, on average, the people you call friends have more friends than you do, and this holds for most people in a social network simultaneously, not just the unpopular ones. If popularity is just spread across people, how can nearly everybody be below their own friends' average?
Reveal the answer
Highly connected people show up in far more friend lists than isolated people do, so when you average 'number of friends my friends have' across the whole population, the popular hubs get massively overcounted relative to how often they count themselves. That sampling bias, not any individual's social failure, pushes the average friend-of-a-friend count above the population's own average, which is also why your social media feed feels unusually lively.
— Scott L. Feld, Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do — American Journal of Sociology, 1991