Over the past three years, I’ve sent and received a lot of texts. Over 110,000, to be exact. I’ve texted with over 250 different people, though about 75% of those texts (over 80,000 texts!) are with a sum total of 10 people.
I learned all of this after discovering the hidden bounty of iMessage data on my computer. Because I have the messages app, each time I send or receive an iMessage, it gets recorded in a SQL database on my laptop. Most of the information you would expect is there - the content of a text, the time and date it was sent, who sent the text, etc.
Texts can be like a time capsule. Looking through who I was texting and what I was texting about is a reminder of what it was like to be graduating college or starting a new job or setting up a first date. But if I’m being honest with myself, there are really only three things that this data makes me want to do:
Create publicly available rankings of who I text the most in order to spark a competition among my friends that invariably results in friends texting me more often and me getting to feel cool.
Use arbitrary metrics like “Haha people” and “Lol people” to divide my friends into two teams - once again with the ultimate goal to get people to text me more so I can feel cool.
Prove to my dad that I DO, in fact, text him back despite his constant complaining that I “never respond to all the great articles he sends about the Cubs”
The leaderboard:
We’ve already seen that my top 10 texters take up 75% percent of my texts. But even within the top 10 people I text, John C - my roommate from freshman year of college - is dominant. In fact, over one out of every four texts has been with John.
Shoutout to John! You’re crushing it. Specifically, it’s worth noting that John has about 10x the number of texts as David, my other suitemate from Freshman year. @David, step up your game.
Overall, this top 10 makes sense - it includes my girlfriend (Karen), other friends from college (Meg, John B, David, Matt), friends from high school (Ben T, Ben M), a friend from work (Leah), and my mom.
(Notably absent from the Top 10 is my dad, which I will admit does not bode well for my ability to prove thesis #3. We’ll get to that later.)
It’s admittedly a bit awkward that Karen is ranked second, though to be fair she’s starting off at a disadvantage: We didn’t meet until March of 2017. When you look at texts exchanged over time, the picture changes a bit.
As you might expect, texting with Karen skyrockets quickly after we met, and she has been battling John for the top spot since mid-2017 (leading outright for the past five months).
In fact, since July 2017 there have been 9 month-to-month lead changes between the two of them, with an average lead of ~300 texts. All of which is to say … the slot for next month’s winner feels wide open.
‘Haha’ vs. ‘Lol’:
A funny thing happened when I looked at the most common words I’ve been sent. The #1 word was ‘lol’.
Now, that’s not particularly surprising. The reason I would expect this is that I know, for a fact, that John C likes sending me a good ‘lol’. Happens all the time. And if John has sent me the most texts overall over the past couple years, it stands to reason that he would drive ‘lol’ up in the rankings.
Unsurprisingly, John sends almost 80% of the lol’s I receive.
Let’s compare this with Karen.
Unlike John, Karen is a ‘haha’ person. In fact, compared with her over 250 haha’s, Karen has only ever lol’d 7 times. That’s a 35x difference. And, in case you’rewondering, John has only ever sent 71 hahas (about 4% of his total lol count).
We can measure this a bit more rigorously. Let’s define the ‘lol-haha index’ as the percent of words you send that are ‘lol’ minus the percent of words you send that are ‘haha’. The bigger your lol-haha index number is, the more of a ‘lol’ person you are (conversely, the more negative your index number is, the more of a ‘haha’ person you are).
Calculating the lol-haha index for the top 10 texters produces:
| Name | Percent Lol | Percent Haha | Lol-Haha Index |
|---|---|---|---|
| John C | 6.1% | 0.4% | 5.6% |
| Leah | 1.3% | 0.7% | 0.6% |
| Meg | 0.3% | 0.2% | 0.1% |
| Mom | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| David | 0.0% | 0.1% | -0.1% |
| John B | 0.0% | 0.2% | -0.2% |
| Ben T | 3.4% | 3.8% | -0.4% |
| Ben M | 0.9% | 2.1% | -1.1% |
| Karen | 0.0% | 1.5% | -1.5% |
| Matt | 0.7% | 3.6% | -2.9% |
It’s lonely at the top: Despite having the strongest overall lean towards ‘lol’ or ‘haha’ of anyone, John C is effectively the only real ‘lol’ person of the bunch. Team Haha, on the other hand, has a few stalwarts: Matt has a haha preference almost twice as strong as Karen! Ben M seems to prefer a good ‘haha’ as well, though he’ll have to cut down on the ‘lols’ to really boost that number.
Both Team Lol and Team Haha would do well to go after Ben T: On a relative basis, Ben sends ‘haha’ or ‘lol’ more than anyone else, though he flips back and forth on which one to use.
(As an aside, shoutout to my Mom who loves Strunk and White and has never once used either “lol” or “haha” in a text)
Let’s take a look at who has been winning the Lol/Haha fight over time:
We have ourselves a battle!
Unsurprisingly, Team Haha lags far behind before Karen comes into the picture. But ever since the beginning of 2018, Haha has given Lol a run for its money. Given that Karen sends me about as many texts as John C does these days, my suspicion is that John will need to get some additional Lol support if he wants to stay competitive It’s a pretty impressive performance carrying the team up until now, but with Karen’s texts on the rise and the support of Matt and Ben M, I’m not sure he can hold them off for long.
Hi Dad. Stop saying I don’t respond to your texts.
My dad is constantly complaining that I don’t respond to his texts, which drives me crazy. I’m convinced I respond to his texts, regularly, in a prompt manner. He gets mad at me. I argue back. We go in circles.
Now, I finally have the data I need to prove my dad wrong.
Uh oh. I think I need to restart this section.
Hi Dad. I’m sorry for not responding to your texts…
I guess in my defense, a lot of those ‘Over a week’ responses might just be from when conversations end, or texts that don’t require a response? And then I don’t text my dad for another week or two until he texts me again?
So it’s not necessarily true that I don’t respond to my dad’s texts promptly. It could just be that I never text my dad…
I feel like I’m digging myself into a hole.