The problems with WhatsApp groups

It seems that whenever more than 2 people want to chat, someone often just goes ahead and creates a WhatsApp group. This may solve the problem, but brings a bunch of NEW problems, and there’s a better alternative that we already have:

Facebook Messenger

Both WhatsApp and Messenger are owned by Facebook, so Facebook has our data anyway. There’s no “privacy” argument for WhatsApp. On the contrary, on WhatsApp, everyone can see your phone number and can call you directly. Is that private?

Anyway, here are some Messenger Chat features that WhatsApp doesn’t have. They’re pretty important:

• Newcomers can see and search the chat history, so they don’t have to ask the same questions over and over
• You can clearly see the names of the participants (in WhatsApp, sometimes you see only a nickname, or even only a phone number)
• In Messenger, you can see the avatars of the people in the group chat, and you can tap the avatar to go to their Facebook profile and learn more / connect. In a WhatsApp group, you can’t do that.
• Any Messenger char group member can invite other participants. With WhatsApp, you have to bug the group admin to add others.
• Messenger backs up your chat history to the cloud automatically. WhatsApp requires special setup to do that.

Since I wrote this article in 2019, some of WhatsApp’s limitations were solved, and Messenger degraded its functionality:

• Since spring 2022, WhatsApp also allows reactions, though only 5 (👍, ❤️, 😂, 😲, 🙏🏻)
• Messenger used to supports polls (who wants to go buggying, vs. go to the beach), but that functionality was removed
• Messenger runs without restrictions from phones, as well as laptops/desktops (in the browser at messenger.com). WhatsApp only ran reliably on ONE phone. If you used a backup or secondary phone, you had to deactivate WhatsApp on the other phone. If you wanted to type from the computer, you had to keep your phone online too (can’t put it in airplane mode to charge faster, for example). If you changed your number, you may be forced to revalidate your phone (this might still be the case).
  Now WhtasApp allows up to 5 devices to be connected to your account.

Please, let’s stop using WhatsApp groups unless we have some real reason to do so.