On Quitting Whatsapp Chatrooms

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When I worked as a deicer I was working such unsociable hours that my personal life took a hit. Friends would often discuss going to climb at 19:00 or so but I couldn’t. I had to be up at 02:00 to be at work by 04:00 ready to deice planes. After a while of feeling isolated I quit that chat, to preserve my mental health.

A year later I had a new climbing group and a new chatroom that I was part of. Here too, I quit. This time it’s because I had a broken arm, so I was suffering another bout of ROMO. Reminder of Missing Out.

A Morning Whatsapp Tidy

This morning I quit three or four more chatrooms, but this time for different reasons. The reasons are the following:

I’m not interested in drinking and most nocturnal events.

When I participate in an event I want it to be small enough to be social and I don’t want to see a waiting list system. For this reason I rarely join these group activities anyway.

The key reason I quit these groups is that they go against netiquette. It’s an old fashioned term from the 90s but I think it’s worth looking into today. The idea is that unless there is a clear and valid reason to control conversations you don’t. You trust the community to look after itself.

The drop that made the vase overflow is that a group was locked overnight because an admin was on a pubcrawl. In my eyes a healthy community is one that trusts its members enough not to lock the chatroom. To me, locking a chatroom is both offensive and pointless, especially since Whatsapp is built on people chatting in the first place.

The Positive

I am part of two active communities. One is Strava based, and the other is Meetup based. I participate in Nyon events two, three or even more times per week, especially in summer, when the weather permits. This is a group of people I could see daily, if I wanted, and do sports with three to four times per week, especially in summer, but to a large extent even in winter, especially now that running is an option. It used to be a cycling only group.

The second group is a cycling group in Geneve. The key difference is that this group is in Nyon so I have a 40km ride to get there and back, as well as the ride itself. On Saturday I have to choose one or the other, every summer Saturday. That’s why I’m content.

That’s why I carried out some electronic spring cleaning this morning. That’s why I quit at least three or four chatrooms.

Obsolete Whatsapp Chat

For me, Whatsapp should be a place to converse with friends and acquaintances between activities, as well as to discuss future projects. What I saw yesterday and this morning was an avalanche of posts trying to prevent people from chatting, but also a negative attitude towards community. To be specific, I suggested that we could have two Nyon “chats”. One of these would be “events only”. No chatter. The other, which is the existing group, would become the “verbose group”, i.e. the one for people who wanted to chat. Two people approved that idea, and two people were negative about it. A third “laughed”.

Last night I thought the issue had been resolved until I saw “I’m locking the chat overnight while I’m at a pubcrawl, by the admin, and that was the final straw. That’s when I dumped three or four chats. That’s when I spring cleaned.

Events Exist in Whatsapp

While writing this blog post I noticed that Events do exist in Whatsapp. It would be easy to create events, without creating a new chat each time. It would also make keeping track of participants very easy, because participants would take that themselves. I don’t know why the feature isn’t used.

And Finally

I am opposed to using Whatsapp since it was bought by Facebook. I use it in the hope of social connections. When someone, once per month, or more often says “I’m sick of people being so chatty” it encourages me to feel socially disconnected. It also encourages me to dump Whatsapp, since my expectation of conversation is not reflected by other people.

The fact that I wrote two blog posts shows why “stepping away” and quitting these groups is healthy. In the Pre-Facebook era Whatsapp was for friends to chat between each other. In the Facebook owned and post pandemic era my values, and those of other Whatsapp users are at odds, hence the rationality of quitting.

Coming Soon

I’m playing with Eleventy and Strava data. I will write about this experience shortly. I will be back to positive and constructive posts shortly.