This idea has been roaming around my head for a little bit, and I finally decided to put it out there.
Most Americans, at least of my generation (don't laugh young ones. If you have to ask who Kevin Bacon is, look him up!) are familiar with the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
The idea behind the game is that Kevin Bacon has worked with so many people over the course of his career, that it would take no more than 6 links to connect any person to Kevin Bacon. For me it goes like this.
I worked on a Cruise Ship with a guy names Christopher Sapienza, who was an actor on the ship. He went on to perform as an extra in films and over the course of that time worked on the film Unbreakable Starring Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis was in a movie with Gary Oldman who was in Criminal Law with Kevin Bacon.
My "Bacon Number" is Four.
Kevin Bacon (0) - Gary Oldman (1) - Bruce Willis (2) - Christopher Sapienza (3) - Me (4)
I thought this would be an interesting Social experiment to play here on Steem. Of course, we have a more interesting subject to connect to than Kevin Bacon. We have @ned.
So I got to work. The idea here is that we connect by who follows us, not who we follow. Otherwise everyone could go and follow ned for that 1 degree. Nah... We need to make it more challenging.
Of all the active accounts on Steem, @ned currently follows 914. So that is 914 people who are one degree of Ned. Our job, then, is to connect to one of those 914 people.
For me, it was a whole lot easier than I thought. I have several direct connections to Ned. My number is 2 on several accounts. I didn't go through the whole list, but two that popped out -
@ned follows @papa-pepper who follows me
@ned follows @stellabelle who follows me
Yay! I'm done!
Or not! Having found a two degree connection, I decided to spread it out and see if I could find different ways to make six degrees. It was way harder to get to six without too many crossovers. i.e. I couldn't make a chain that included Stellabelle or Papa as the 5th link since they are first links. In the end, there are some places where I could cut out a link or two, but this isn't scientific OK?!?!
So here's what I came up with.
3 Degrees
@ned - @acidyo - @saywha - @mikepm74
4 Degrees
@ned - @justtryme90 - @alcibiades - @carlgnash - @mikepm74
5 Degrees
@ned - @donkeypong - @anyx - @patrice - @inquiringtimes - @mikepm74
6 Degrees
@ned - @kingscrown - @biophil - @officialfuzzy - @intelliguy - @krazykrista - @mikepm74
I'm sure I could have found a lot more obscure ways to get from Ned to me, but I wanted to work with names I was familiar with from start to finish.
So now it's your turn. Play with the follows, how do you connect?
The one thing I really took away from this, even though there are so many users signed up on the platform, we really are all connected by a pretty small chain. I would bet, when it comes right down to it, all of the names listed above, along with some I couldn't use because they shortened the chain too much, make up a pretty solid core community guiding Steem, or at least our part of it, in the direction we want to go.