Five Whatsapp groups you secretly wish you could leave

WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Mark Zuckerberg's company Meta, has just announced wide-ranging changes to its privacy features. Users can now hide whether they are online or not, and stop people taking screenshots of time-limited messages – a charter for anyone who wants to send naked selfies or bitchy little comments.

Zuckerberg said the reforms were aimed at keeping the service as “private and secure as face-to-face conversations”. This may be true, but only if you often find yourself having “face-to-face conversations”. Really, they are a recognition that WhatsApp has evolved into a digital police state, where everyone pretends to get on but bitches relentlessly behind each other’s backs.

By far the most important change is that you will be able to leave groups without your departure being announced to the whole party. For anyone who has somehow evaded WhatsApp, “groups” are one of the app’s key functions. They are meant to make it easy to form little digi-huddles of disparate groups of friends, family, colleagues and three blokes you met once at a conference. But with the internet’s implacable law of unintended consequences, groups have become a menace.

What was meant to be a useful directory of different aspects of your life has come to resemble a locked mansion full of different dinner parties you cannot leave.

Until now, binning off a group has resulted in a little italicised “Ed has left the group”: the digital equivalent of spitting on the floor, throwing up a V-sign and breaking open the door. Funny, but mostly unacceptable, especially if relatives or colleagues are present. It is also irreversible. Returning to the group entails going back on your hands and knees to ask to be readmitted. WhatsApp’s changes mean you will be able to slip out undetected, like someone with a better offer who does not want to offend the host. By the time anyone realises what has happened, you will be back (metaphorically) home with your (metaphorical) trotters up.

This is bad news for the various types of universal group, which everyone who uses WhatsApp will recognise.

1. The stag/ hen group

One of a number of varieties of Mary Celeste group, formed for some long-forgotten purpose and drifting aimlessly on, punctuated every few months by someone piping up to share a picture. At best these are harmless idiosyncrasies, muted months ago. At worst they try constantly to force reunions on people who never wanted to meet in the first place. “We should get a drink,” someone says. No. We had plenty of drinks.

2. The family group

In one sense, your family is the group you cannot quit, at least not without causing a scene, so the WhatsApp rules have been appropriate. On the other hand, family groups invariably descend into a mix of technological incompetence and the continuation of dinner-table war by other means. Parents, in particular, will not pass up the chance to harass multiple children at the same time.

3: The neighbourhood group

Proof that any reasonable collection of people can be dominated by a handful of psychopaths focused on a couple of issues. Nobody who is in a street group wonders how Mussolini got started. Invariably sloughed off its original purpose months ago to become a single-issue campaigning for someone in a frenzy about bin collection, a planning dispute or “anti-social behaviour”. There is no doubting where the real anti-social behaviour lies.

4. The ‘old friends’ group

Yes, you went to school or university with these people. Some of them may even be your friends offline. That doesn’t mean you enjoy being in a group with lots of them, sharing little observations and memories, trying not to think of the youth you will never get back, ignoring the unbridgeable distances wedged between you by time, income disparity and the other thousand humiliations of adult life.

5. The ‘lads’ group

This does not have to be male. The lads group exists as a repository of jokes you are no longer allowed to make in public. The measure of any self-respecting lads group is that its exposure would destroy the reputation of all its members. Ironically, this is probably the group you don’t want to leave but ought to. This group will have a “witty” name.

...and the one group you want to stay in

The small side group bitching about one of the above. Delicious. Almost enough to make the others worthwhile.