Whenever I see headlines like these, "X billion messages per day/hour/second in some web service Y", I wonder what the hell is that service doing that it generates so much messages? I.e. I could understand Facebook, with its billion+ of users and built-in messaging platform, could generate billion of "messages" a day. But a mostly read-based service like Yelp?

But I finally realized - those messages are probably mostly tracking, ads, more tracking, some infrastructure work and even more ads & tracking. The sausage machine that turns people into money.