Preferential attachment
the rich get richer because connections breed connections
Grounded in the research on Wikipedia: Preferential attachment (Barabasi-Albert model, 1999)
the move
Preferential attachment is the rule that whoever already has the most connections keeps gaining the most. New people in any network don't link up randomly. They link to whoever's already well-linked. So a follower count, a friend group, a reputation, all grow proportionally to how big they already are. The popular node gets disproportionately more new ties. It's a snowball, not a coin flip.
the first effect
Physicists Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Reka Albert formalized this in 1999, modeling how the web actually wires itself. Their finding: real networks aren't bell-curved, they're 'scale-free.' A few hub nodes hoard most of the links while everyone else has barely any. The math is older (Yule 1925, Simon 1955, Merton's 'Matthew effect' 1968), but Barabasi-Albert proved it builds the lopsided shape on its own.