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May 25

What's the name for the blown up texts so common in social media?

In social media, many simple texts go viral which have nothing special other than they are blown up to a picture. People may forward them because (a) it's dead easy and (b) they find them funny or they want to proselytize the expressed opinion to others. What are they called? You might consider them a subgroup of internet memes. However, they don't fit the definition “Two central attributes of Internet memes are creative reproduction and intertextuality.”, nor do they contain any other noteworthy creativity. Their only purpose seems to be that they're bigger than normal text so that they gather more importance. Even “eye candy” would be too flattering, so I'd rather call them "rectangular attention sinks". Maybe I'd better turn to a sociologist with this question.

Related tech question: Do any social media offer a way to simply filter and ignore these attention sinks? ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 09:41, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can you provide any examples of "blown up texts"? Do you mean texts as in a form of online messaging between two people, such as SMS? ―Panamitsu (talk) 10:06, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For example an image that contains nothing but the text
Why's it always “nyc smells like pee” and never “my pee smells like the greatest city in the world”
(In this particular case, the image actually contains some user name who may have originally posted this, along with their picture, contrary to what I described above. But I picked this because I found it somewhat witty. And the user name and picture are not important here.) ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 14:28, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In magazines and newspapers, they are called pull quotes. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 22:06, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting; I wasn't aware of that term. But that's not the same thing. If you want to transfer the term onto social media, it would have to be some text taken from a longer discussion, rather like people use bold face and capitalization in such discussions as here. The blown up texts of my question do not pull a reader to any source. Even in the case of the “nyc” example which happens to contain something that looks like an author alias and picture, there is no way to jump to the original discussion. So, they're neither “pull” nor “quotes”. ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 08:21, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For clarification: pull quotes are pulled from the text, though I guess they are designed to pull you in as well. --142.112.143.8 (talk) 21:24, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, that seems redundant. Or what would be a non-pull quote, then? ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 05:08, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pull quotes (in the original sense of the term) coinhabit the space with the text from which they were pulled, so in a print magazine the quoted passage would typically appear twice on a page: once in the running text, and once standing out on ts own in a blown-up font size. Normal quotes typically appear merely once and usually have the same font size as the surrounding text, or when displayed as a block sometimes a slightly smaller font size. --Lambiam 10:23, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the explanation. So their name seems to be a misnomer: The non-pull quotes even have more pulling to do, since they have to pull the text from farther away. But that was only a detour from my original questions. Can we turn back to them, please? ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 15:22, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Diffs

English Wikipedia is almost at 1,225,620,000 diffs, increasing at about 1000 every ten minutes or so I'm guessing. Is there a limit to this number in MediaWiki or the underlying software – cognate with the Y2K problem and the like?

(This is a throwaway question that just occurred to me, not a complaint or anything to take seriously or anything that I'm worrying about!) 46.69.215.187 (talk) 17:18, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki stores complete revisions (previous versions stored backwards deltas as diffs, but later versions store the whole revision and computes the diffs) in the REVISION table. The primary key for that is "int unsigned", which in MySql is a 32 bit integer. That's a max of 4,294,967,295; so that would put en.wikipedia at about 1/4 of the way to the limit. I don't know what provision the developers have for the (surely inevitable) case where that becomes an issue.-- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 18:27, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that answers my question and provides useful extra reading! Thank you @Finlay McWalter: I'm very grateful for your time and expertise. 46.69.215.187 (talk) 18:34, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The reference document also states that there is a 64-bit integer data type, which is one possible solution. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:12, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]