Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
Okay, based on that article Zipf’s law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don’t follow it.
Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.
the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2013/12/on-city-size-distribution_g17a2442/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.
It shows up when choosing things. Most people will choose the largest, some will choose the next largest, etc. I might be wrong, of course.