I know we can filter contest results to show only friends. But MikeMirzayanov has 6554 friends and as far as I know does not participate into contests. So does it mean something special to have a lot of friends on CF? Let's use Codeforces API to get the list of all rated users and then sort it by friendOfCount value.
The top is tourist with 35053 friend. No wonder. He is very popular, even babies know him) My family live in Belarus where is tourist originally from. Gennady tourist Korotkevich is well-know here, his victories always described in news, but there was a classical belorussian writer with the same surname — Vladimir Korotkevich. Once in the evening we had a usual family talk about everything and my oldest mentioned that he had to write an essay for school about Korotkevich. My youngest was completely taken aback. She said "I knew that tourist is great but I did not know how great he is — school essay, oh my god!.."
You can see the table of users who has more 2500 friends below.
There are 353 878 users, 126333 have no friends, 52044 — 1 friend. 64203 have more 10 friends, 5665 of them more then 100 and only 180 more then 1000.
Well personally I think the benefit of keeping a friend list is the filter property in contests to know how your doing in it especially when you're messing up :)
FriendshipForces
When you realise the power of friendship..
I got 7 friends in cf and 0 in real life :((
I follow around a dozen folks here. I tally my codes with theirs after contests. During practice, when I get stuck, I reach out to them & they're always generous to guide.
It is only natural that those having higher ratings will have more number of friends since a lot of people would be curious about the codes of those high raters. Also, some are more like 'fans' obviously (look at Tourist's friends count, I mean he IS phenomenal no doubt!).
You revere some, you follow some ... and you learn from some.
For unknown reasons, I have 99 friends and I don't know anyone of them :(
okay, now it's 100 unknown friends.
I'm one of them. Been stalking your codes for over a year now. Your codes are neat and understandable.
Woah! thanks, At least I know one of my friends now :)
they are more like your followers 😂
I had friend you because I frequently see you in comments.
omg, I'm on the friend list of a master!
Hmm!
Maybe the real codeforces rating is the number of friends we made along the way.
i got negetive .
hahahahahhaahaha, highly relatable :')
Power of family.
Umm, you know that only friends will show YOUR friends. In other words people YOU friended, not people who friended you.