You'll soon be able to ghost a WhatsApp group without making everyone hate you Many years ago, in the bowels of Silicon Valley, some genius realized that people enjoy getting notifications through social media – those little pings of dopamine that make you feel like you matter. But there was a dark side. Now we get notified of pretty much anything and everything, regardless of relevance. There are new …
Much of SM is a mystery to me (or makes me intensely cynical) but I can see how this started : in a live chatroom like IRC you get notifications that someone has gone, and it avoids you addressing a comment to them. This is fine.
However it appears Whatsapp doesn't distinguish between 'gone to bed' and 'walked out slamming the door behind them' , and as being online 24/7 has become the norm, one has mutated into the other.
Whatever. A change for the better.
Now my cynical side looks for a less socially acceptable reason for the change.
Social = group chats, media = you can post pictures and videos. An analogue telephone doesn’t do the latter, and when did people ever set up conference calls for their friends in the 90s?
Sure, there is no feed-like functionality aggregating updates, but that’s a good thing - otherwise the temptation is to ‘optimise’ post order to maximise ‘engagement’/ad inventory value. And we know where that goes in terms of mental health. I’ll have my updates chronologically sorted within groups please.
I'd say: teach them a healthy handling of peer pressure. That your kids can join and leave as they feel like and not based on what they fear someone else might be thinking of them or, worse, how someone else is treating them.
Then again, it's easy to say for anti-social me. So it might indeed by a good thing what WA implemented
> Now we get notified of pretty much anything and everything, regardless of relevance
Its pretty simple to mute notifications from entire Whatsapp groups.
So no need to leave, just let the unread messages pile up.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to inform everyone I have ever met that I've posted something on El Reg.
Quitting a WhatsApp Group in my circle is a big deal, which is why I configured my WA in such a way that others can't add me to groups by themselves, which is the default feature. What they can do is to send me an invite à la LinkedIn and it's up to me to accept it and join the group or not. I've noticed that, if I don't accept an group invite, I get 1/10th the number of questions from others as when I leave a group. This new "Quit Quietly" feature is great for me.
As for why it was not built as default, I happened to ask an ex-WhatsApp PM about this. He told me that, especially in small groups, when people communicate with A, B, C, and C leaves quietly, it could cause misunderstanding because they think they're still communicating with C. Made sense to me.
> I happened to ask an ex-WhatsApp PM about this. He told me that, especially in small groups, when people communicate with A, B, C, and C leaves quietly, it could cause misunderstanding
I don't dispute that your project manager honestly believed that to be the reason, but if my corporate experience is anything to go by, once this got run past sales, legal and marketing, the reason will have morphed into “if we browbeat people into not leaving groups, that means we can increase reach for our advertisers” Note that it's beside the point whether WhatsApp currently post ads in groups or not (no idea if they do, I don't use it). The idea will have certainly been considered.
A "friend" found the solution was tell all their friends it was a work phone and account, so sorry couldn't use it, and everyone at work that it was a personal phone and account.
Which begs the question: does anyone know of a company that has supplied a phone to an employee they said "has" to be on Whasapp (etc) but who doesn't own a phone.
"Which begs the question: does anyone know of a company that has supplied a phone to an employee they said "has" to be on Whasapp (etc) but who doesn't own a phone."
Yeah, me! I've never owned a personal mobile phone and still don't. I've been in jobs where a company mobile phone was provided since the "brick" phones where finally going away, replaced with little black Nokias. Current employer has WhatsApp groups for remote teams to keep in easy touch for general chat, work-related etc that's neither company sensitive nor of interest outside of the team. It's lighter, easier and less hassle than Teams (which we also use for "official" company business)
> does anyone know of a company that has supplied a phone to an employee they said "has" to be on Whasapp (etc)
My local labour and data protection offices would be hearing from me if my employer suggested that I had to enter into a contractual relationship with a third party for no other purpose than employer convenience.
Thankfully, my employer does not do that. Things are a bit… ascetic sometimes but the setup is very resilient and costs are well under control.
...they described as "leaving a party by sneaking out the back door" :-)
On the other hand, why are people so concerned about what others might think of them? I thought the default these days, especially amongst the younger crowd, is that it's doesn't matter what others think. I'm constantly seeing (and hearing!) other peoples phone conversations, about all sorts of sensitive stuff, because so many think it's right and proper to hold phone conversations in public on speaker phone. One woman, just yesterday, was complaining to some energy provider or other that the money had not gone on her card. Back in my day, you had conversations like that in private! Clearly these must not be the same people worried about the "fall out" of leaving a WhatsApp group.
I forgot to add, Meta's new chatbot thinks Zuckerberg is stupid and Facebook exploits people.
It's important to people that other people KNOW that they don't care what people think of them, and they think it's important to know what people think of then not caring what they think and hey, how do those people feel about me not caring what they think of me because it's important to me to and it goes round and round. This is why, when I'm invited to a social networking group, that I just go straight to the "Hell no I'm not joining that stupid shit" to their face, because I'm not a social person to begin with.
Boards like this is just about as social as I'm willing to get, and that's because I post here in my own time, I can leave for days and not hear about it, and when I'm not on here nobody here can reach me. And that's the way I like it.
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