WhatsApp Groups Redundancy Rate Rises

The leading mobile messaging app, WhatsApp, one of Facebook companies has continue to show strong presence among the social media sites. It has constantly occupied one of top the social media messaging app ranking, and occupying a constant second position next only its parent company Facebook. Despite the strong showing, the messaging app has experienced a spate of user abandonment caused by increasing users' dissatisfaction due to unavailability of effective moderation tool that gives admins of WhatsApp groups more control.

The absence of features that help group admins control what members share, especially media content, has resulted to high data consumption, which amounts to money spent. The rate at which some members share obscene and offensive media content such as fake new, porn videos, ghastly auto crash victims and brutal killings is irritating to many who joined the groups believing in the cause for which they were originally created.

Excesses such as these could be prevented if group admins have option that allow them to pre-approve content from members. Sadly, that is not the case, WhatsApp does not have such a feature and group admins and members have to live with the nuisances of a few aggressive individuals within their groups or decide to take a leave from the group. Those members who decide to remain in such a group becomes inactive by not reading post from such a group. 

WhatsApp user abandonment rate is rising as more people are unsubscribing from groups either out-rightly or simply remain redundant. This many not pose any major threat at the moment due to the high number of users on the platform; but it could before an issue if not addressed at this stage. As at August 2019, the total number of WhatsApp users globally was over 2 billion, with about 75% penetration rate among smartphone users alone.

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WhatsApp is currently the second most popular social media platform, next to Facebook with 2 billion users, closely followed by Messenger with 1.3 billion users, another app owned by Facebook. Apparently, the high rate of abandonment resulting from dissatisfied WhatsApp users, is likely to affect its performance. It won't be a surprise if WhatsApp concede the second-place position in the global chart to Messenger before the end of 2020.

WhatsApp is a great app and that is why it is widely used, which is reflected in the number of users; especially because of the ease of sending video, images and instant mobile messaging. Despite the favourable penetration rate of the app, it must contend with the issue of moderation and inadequate control options. The company needs to improve the admin control of the WhatsApp groups, which will enable them set restriction on who can post items on the group or even create read-only access or provide out right censorship of fake news and adult content.

With such enhancement in place and the group admins have better control of group activities and what members post, then the social media app can begin to revamp and revert the high rate of abandonment it is currently experiencing. While we are paying attention on the moderation of groups' activities, it is also important to emphasize some of adverse effects that are likely to occur because of cutting down too much on members’ freedom. As annoying as these unscrupulous activities may be, they have their own nuisance value.

Most WhatsApp groups simply go extinct because of lack of activities, while other groups are kept alive because of the activities of members who post almost anything they can find online. Two scenarios play out here, and one is that there will be increased number of dead WhatsApp groups or groups with a lot of dormant users, if there is too much administrative control; while on the other hand, with moderate admin control, there will be more groups with fewer but active members.

Clearly, having more dead WhatsApp groups is not a viable commercial option, hence the extent of control by groups admins must be on its own moderated.