Research
What 1,151 shared messages tell us about how people share text
We looked at the settings behind 1,151 messages shared on TxtVanish. Half kept the default expiry, a quarter never expire, and 1 in 8 self-destructing notes was never opened.
Every message on TxtVanish comes with a few choices: how long it should live, whether it should self-destruct after being read, how many people can open it. We looked at those choices across 1,151 messages created between 3 March 2025 and 25 September 2026, to see what people actually do when they share text.
We didn’t open a single message to do this. Everything below comes from settings and sizes: when a message was created, which expiry was picked, how many views it allowed and received, and how much space it took up.
1. Half of people never touch the default
The old version of TxtVanish set new messages to expire after 30 days unless you chose otherwise. Half of all messages, 582 of 1,151, went out with exactly that setting.
That’s not laziness; it’s how defaults work everywhere. But it means the default decides how long half of all messages stay online. When we rebuilt TxtVanish, we made the default for plain text one view, with every other option one click away.
2. A quarter of messages are meant to last
For a tool with “vanish” in its name, it’s striking that 287 messages, one in four, were set to never expire. People were clearly using it as somewhere to keep text: notes, snippets, instructions they come back to.
That’s why the new version has editable notes. A note you keep should be a note you can update, not a message frozen the day you wrote it.
3. When people limit views, they almost always mean “once”
One message in five was limited to a number of views. Of the 206 view-limited messages that could be opened at all, 171, or 83%, allowed exactly one view. Two views was a distant second with 21 messages, and only a handful allowed more than five.
Burn after reading is the reason people come to a tool like this, which is why the new version protects that single view from chat-app link previews. More on that in why chat apps burn one-time links.
4. About one in eight self-destructing messages is never opened
Of those 206 view-limited messages, 179 (87%) were opened at least once. The other 27, 13%, were never opened at all.
Some of those were probably tests. Some were sent to people who didn’t need them in the end. And some, we suspect, were sent to people who never realised they had one. Until now, a sender had no way of knowing. The new sender link shows whether and when a message was opened, so you can follow up instead of wondering.
5. Most messages are short
We can’t see what people write, but we can see how much space each message takes, and roughly work back to its length:
- A quarter of messages are under about 80 bytes: the size of a password, a code or a phone number.
- The median is about 480 bytes, around 80 words: a short paragraph.
- A quarter are over 1.2 KB, and one in ten is over 5 KB, the size of a config file, a stack trace or a long set of instructions.
So TxtVanish gets used for two quite different jobs: tiny secrets, and chunks of text that are awkward to send any other way. The new version handles the second better, with a code mode, line numbers and file attachments for anything that doesn’t fit as text.
6. When people share
Activity peaks around midnight UTC, between 23:00 and 01:00. That’s evening across the Americas, morning in Australia and East Asia, and early morning in India. The quietest hour is 15:00 UTC.
By weekday, Tuesday is the busiest (187 messages) and Sunday the quietest (135). Saturday, surprisingly, is the second busiest.
7. Growth comes in waves
Messages created per month. Use has come in waves rather than a steady climb, with the two biggest months in July 2025 and August 2026.
* September 2026 covers 1 to 25 September only.
What we changed because of this
- New default: plain text now defaults to one view, because that’s what people choose when they choose at all.
- Sender links: so the one in eight messages that never gets opened doesn’t go unnoticed.
- Editable notes: for the quarter of messages that are meant to last.
- Protection from link previews: so a one-view message is read by a person, not a chat app’s robot.