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.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Okay, based on that article Zipf's law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don't follow it.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago

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.