  The friendship paradox implies that a person will, on average, have fewer
friends than their friends do. Prior work has shown how the friendship paradox
can lead to perception biases regarding behaviors that correlate with the
number of friends: for example, people tend to perceive their friends as being
more socially engaged than they are. Here, we investigate the consequences of
this type of social comparison in the conceptual setting of content creation
("sharing") in an online social network. Suppose people compare the amount of
feedback that their content receives to the amount of feedback that their
friends' content receives, and suppose they modify their sharing behavior as a
result of that comparison. How does that impact overall sharing on the social
network over time? We run simulations over model-generated synthetic networks,
assuming initially uniform sharing and feedback rates. Thus, people's initial
modifications of their sharing behavior in response to social comparisons are
entirely driven by the friendship paradox. These modifications induce
inhomogeneities in sharing rates that can further alter perception biases. If
people's responses to social comparisons are monotonic (i.e., the larger the
disparity, the larger the modification in sharing behavior), our simulations
suggest that overall sharing in the network gradually declines. Meanwhile,
convex responses can sustain or grow overall sharing in the network. We focus
entirely on synthetic graphs in the present work and have not yet extended our
simulations to real-world network topologies. Nevertheless, we do discuss
practical implications, such as how interventions can be tailored to sustain
long-term sharing, even in the presence of adverse social-comparison effects.
