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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by these numbers. 60m monthly actives generating 12bn messages per day. So on average each active user sends 200 messages every day. That seems astoundingly high. Can someone more familiar with engagement metrics for this type of service comment?

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That probably means people use group chat.

Suppose five people chat for a minute. 20-30 lines of text sent to four people (5 minus the sender) equals 80-120 countable messages. And if Telegram users act like on some old IRC channels, and have long-running chat sessions that most attendees don't pay attention to, you can get thousands per day per user.

i have 5 active group chats (i had to turn off notifications for telegram on Ubuntu Phone because of this)

Got it. I was approaching it from messages sent, not messages received. I wonder if they are also counting messages received per device, rather than user. E.g. If I have a phone, a tablet, and a desktop, does every message I receive count triple for this metric?

They might also include presence messaging to inflate their numbers.

Unlikely; people's presence wobbliness may have grown since February, but by a factor of 12? Nah.

I have a feeling that the main change may have been a better UI on the group chat.

I am pretty sure they are including automated bot messages in the 12bn value. No way average user messages is 200 a day.

Yes, there is absolutely no doubt they are including service & bot messages in to the count. And they are plenty.

i think its reasonable, i push similar numbers.

I can’t comment with much more detail, but that number sounds reasonable to me.

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