I don't think it's as bad as that. It's the mean number of friends, not the median.
The example of twitter makes this a bit more clear: your followers have more followers, on average, than you. But that's because you likely follow someone with a million followers. That one person greatly affects the mean follower count.
So if you follow 10 people, one of whom has 1000 followers, and the rest just have one, the paradox still holds.
The example of twitter makes this a bit more clear: your followers have more followers, on average, than you. But that's because you likely follow someone with a million followers. That one person greatly affects the mean follower count.
So if you follow 10 people, one of whom has 1000 followers, and the rest just have one, the paradox still holds.