How to survive WhatsApp groups

WhatsApp, that hated and loved application in equal parts, has sin and penance in its groups. On the one hand, they are tremendously useful for stimulating conversations between friends, family and even work colleagues, but on the other, some of their components have turned them into a leisure area without considering the availability of other people’s time. Jokes, videos and montages that, on the other hand, you may have received several times in other groups, circulate without control to the despair of many. It must be remembered that communication on this platform, despite being asynchronous, is based on immediacy: you expect a response to your message in a reasonable amount of time (minutes, at most hours), after which time misunderstandings can arise.

And it is precisely the potential misunderstandings that make us unable to leave a WhatsApp group. To date, whoever leaves a group is singled out for public ridicule by the system with a message “So and so, he has left the group”. A drink that is too bitter for many and that can be the trigger for a social conflict of uncalculated dimensions. “We are afraid of giving a bad image of ourselves to others,” he explains. Joan Salvador Vilallonga, psychologist expert in social skills, in reference to the reluctance to leave the groups. “We don’t want them to think we’re surly or that we don’t like the members of the group,” he adds, “there can also be some concern that when we go out we start missing out on interesting things and get left behind.”

Thus, a good part chooses to stay in the group to avoid greater evils. And if it has been ruled out, for a social reason, to leave the group, how to survive it then? We are going with a series of tips to make them more bearable.

Leaving the group “through the back door”

The bad news is that it is not possible yet; The good news is that WhatsApp is already working on this possibility, according to reports. WaBetaInfo. As published by this channel —well known for the accuracy of its leaks— the signature belonging to Meta will allow the group to be left without the rest of the components being notified (except for the administrator, who will be alerted). This new function will allow a discreet exit from the groups, since there will not be a message notifying the rest as was the case until now. The only way to know if any of its components have abandoned it will be to do a count one by one.

This is so, as we have pointed out, except for the administrators who will be notified of each exit; a lesser evil that can be managed individually, allowing each righteous person to justify their exit in a discreet manner and to only one person. WhatsApp is testing this feature on the web version of the platform, but it can be assumed that it will soon reach the betas of both Android and iPhone.

mute the group

Until this coveted feature is available, the most reasonable way to live with a group you don’t want to belong to is to ignore it and at least avoid being interrupted by its notifications. In this sense, WhatsApp allows you to individually silence the groups you want; To do this, simply click on the name of the group and then on Silence. By activating this option, the user will stop receiving new notifications with each message and will also not see the unread message balloon on the icon. But don’t worry, because if someone makes a direct mention to a user (using the @ before the name), the system will send a notification ignoring the mute activation. Having muted the group, technically it’s as if it doesn’t exist, but if even so the unread messages icon on the interface still bothers us visually, you can go one step further and archive it (by continuously pressing on the group chat without enter the).

Prevent being added to a group

Dead the dog, the rabies is gone. Something like this can also be applied with WhatsApp groups: the system can be configured so that a user cannot be freely added to a group. By default, anyone who has our number in her contact list (regardless of whether we have theirs or not), can add us to a group without asking permission. This reality has allowed anyone to discover overnight that they have been added to a group they don’t really want to be in. As we have conceded that it is better to save yourself the trouble of going out, it will always be better to filter who can and who cannot add us to a group. To do this, in Settings / Account / Privacy / Groups, we can limit our contacts to those who have the privilege of adding us to a group without asking permission. Unfortunately, there is not among them the option of ‘nobody’ for those who do not want to know anything about the groups.

Limit posting privileges

Some groups can be really useful for fluid communication between a group of people, as in a community of neighbors or a group of parents at school. However, in both cases, if communication privileges are not limited, there is a risk that an informative message (for example, in the first case, the elevator check), could become an unchecked exchange of accusations by any other reason. Fortunately, group admins (whoever created the group and those appointed by it) can remove the ‘right to reply’ and allow only admins to post. To do this, simply click on the name of the group and access Group Configuration and grant the privileges that are considered appropriate. Additionally, you can create Mailing lists, in which one can send the same message to a group of people without them seeing the rest of the components. The problem with this system is that the responses will reach the sender as an individual chat.

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