If you’ve ever poked around Steam, you’ll have noticed St4ck. St4ck has the highest Steam user level ever, and when I was poking around my network of Steam friends, I noticed that for almost any profile, if you continuously clicked the highest-leveled user of their friend, you would eventually find St4ck.
I thought that was kind of weird and I forgot about it for a while, but then I figured it might be interesting to see some statistics on this interaction. So, scraped a bunch of random steam account data (260 accounts) and then made some graphs:
Using the method of clicking on the highest-level friend until you find St4ck, 83.9% of random accounts led to St4ck.
The distribution of separation wasn’t too interesting, the average degree of separation from St4ck is ~6.26 and the median and mode are both 6.
Lastly, I made a Sankey chart that shows the flow of accounts to St4ck. You can see it on plot.ly here. The chart is very hectic, but if you look around on plot.ly, you can get some idea of which accounts are the most common stepping stones to reaching St4ck.
I thought that it was a really cool, kind of weird Steam interaction that shows an the type of funneling behavior to more popular accounts that occurs on social networks.