Figure 3

Distribution of lengths of posts containing embedded quotes and of the quotes. Left panel: distribution of the lengths of comments containing embedded quotes from other posts in the BBC dataset (blue dots). The distribution has a shifted lognormal shape $f_{LN}(x)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi }\sigma }\frac{1}{x-x_0}exp(-{(ln(x-x_0)-\mu )}^2/2{\sigma }^2)$, with $x_0=190$ bytes (black line). The right panel shows the distribution of the quoted text fragment lengths, well described by a the standard lognormal form, with the mean value of 196 bytes.