Explanation
You are six handshakes away from anyone on Earth.
Think of someone completely unlike you — a fisherman in Vietnam, a nurse in Brazil, a shepherd in Mongolia. What are the odds that you're connected to them through a chain of personal acquaintances? Most people assume: almost zero. They're wrong.
In 1967, psychologist Stanley Milgram sent letters to strangers in Nebraska, asking them to forward each one to a target person in Boston — only through people they knew personally. The letters that arrived took an average of just 5.2 steps.
The math explains this seemingly impossible fact. If you know 150 people, and each of them knows 150 others, you already reach 22,500 people in two steps. Three steps: 3.4 million. Five steps: more than 75 billion — the entire world population, several times over. Networks grow exponentially. Six steps is enough to reach anyone.
In 2016, Facebook confirmed it with data from 1.59 billion users: the average distance between any two people was 3.57 degrees. Not six — three and a half.
Here, there is no centralized experience that users connect to once they've passed some criteria or moderation. Each person sees only their friends' friends, up to six degrees of separation — an entirely personal, tailor-made experience.
And no single algorithm applied to everyone: here, each user administers their own algorithm, the one that determines what they see.
Your turn