50 Of The Wildest Conversations Ever Screenshotted, Courtesy Of This Instagram Page

Ever since Ray Tomlinson made email one of the hottest things in the '70s and Nokia, the once largest phone manufacturer in the world, did the same with text messaging after presenting the world's first mobile phone with a texting function - the way humans communicated evolved in mysterious yet sophisticated ways.

Although, we're pretty sure Tomlinson and others responsible for putting homing pigeons out of business would be pretty confused to see how much time, energy, and thought we put into sliding into someone's DMs.

Perhaps the greatest case in point on this is Instagram, the beloved social media app which has more than 2.3 billion active users today. Many might not remember this but when it was launched in 2010, all you could do was share photos, like and comment on them. That's it.

Everything changed, however, when in 2013 Facebook, the app's parent company, added a direct message feature. The only caveat: you couldn't start a conversation with a "Send bobs" or "Hi dear", or an all-explaining GIF. Something that only changed a few years down the line, making Instagram the lifeline for generations to come.

While it's hard to say exactly how many DMs are sent each day from apps like Instagram, the newest data gives us a ballpark number of 18.7 billion texts worldwide every day - and that's not including app-to-app messages from WhatsApp, Twitter and other social media giants. Pretty difficult to wrap our heads around that one, huh?

On the other hand, it's not so surprising, given that teens send a minimum of 50 text messages a day, according to one survey in 2010. Which means that by today's standards, this number could be as high as the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

However, no king can rule forever. What Facebook is for the 'MTV generation', Instagram became for Gen Z'ers. According to Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who authors the youth-culture newsletter After School, "They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”

In a recent survey conducted by Piper Sandler, which involved 14,500 teenagers from 47 states in the US, it was revealed that barely 20% of them selected Instagram as their preferred social media platform. Considering that 75% of them admit to using Instagram as their go-to app for DMs, it's quite telling.