Why did you leave the group chat?

Some of us love our group chats. Others of us hate them and would love nothing more than to leave them all. But why do we want to leave? Maybe you’ve had someone leave a group without giving you a reason as to why, and maybe it hurt a little bit. Vox.com’s Kaitlyn Tiffany and I are here to help you work through that pain with this episode of Why’d You Push That Button.

First, I chat with my friend Liz who tells us about her current and past group chat drama. She’s actually very undramatic and seems to tell it like it is. I like this about her. Then Kaitlyn interviews Maggie Lange, who has written for GQ about never leaving group chats, ever. She’s pro-mute. Kaitlyn and I then take all our concerns to Asha Sharma, director of product management for Messenger, who tells us all about why people actually leave group chats and what the teens are up to these days.

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Ashley: We are back with Asha Sharma. She runs the consumer products at Messenger at Facebook. I’m really curious to know, when you’re working at Messenger, how important are group chats? Is it a big part of what they use the platform for, or are they mostly using it for one-on-one chats?

Asha Sharma: So we see a lot of one-on-one chats, but more recently, we’ve seen group conversations continue to grow. So I think last year, about 2.5 million groups were created every single day, and that number has grown tremendously since. The thing about groups is generally, they’re pretty transient, and so you can go from in real life to on Messenger pretty easily and seamlessly, and we’ve been investing in a lot of new features to make that more rich for people to use in their discussions. Groups are pretty critical for us, and I think it’s a really important way for people to spend time together.

Kaitlyn: So you mentioned that there’s been a ton of groups created in the last year. I know Facebook has been focusing a lot on Groups, and also there are group chats attached to all those Groups. Why would someone leave the group chat, and how often do you see people doing that?

I’m sure people leave for a variety of different reasons. But if you kind of think about it and take a step back, for groups in real life, generally, if people leave a group discussion it’s because they’re busy. It’s because it’s no longer relevant. It’s because they’re kind of done listening. They don’t feel like they can contribute, and in real life, people will just leave the room when that happens. I think that Messenger, like I said, group conversations on Messenger are a similar format to in real life, and so when people are leaving groups, it’s generally for the same reason: people stop listening, they feel like they can’t engage anymore or contribute value, it’s noisy — things like that.

Ashley: Is that something you think a lot about at Facebook? Do you want to prevent people from leaving the group chat or is that totally acceptable behavior to you?

I don’t think we think about it as, “we don’t want people to leave a group chat,” or “people have to join group chats.” I think that our role is to make it easier for people to spend time together in the way that they want and so we need to build tools that are transparent and easy and clear. And so we try to think about real-world behavior and then build tools to support that. In real life, if you want to leave a conversation, you leave a room; it’s pretty clear that that’s happening. That’s why we try to make it easy and transparent for somebody to leave a room, or leave a group, when they’re using Messenger.

Ashley: I always think about Slack because in Slack, people will sometimes leave a room and you don’t know why, and then you get that notification that says, “Kaitlyn has left the room.” And Messenger also gives you a notification of, “Kaitlyn has left the group.” Why do you have that statement?

Kaitlyn: People use it in Slack as a joke. If someone makes a really bold or obnoxious or controversial statement they’ll leave the Slack room dramatically just to make a point. So in Facebook, it’s kind of the same light smack in the face.

I think we’re still learning the cultural nuances, and so the more and more people start to use groups for their everyday conversation, the more we’ll just learn a ton for what people want to use groups for and what types of features that they want. In general, the spirit of it, and for most people is, when a group is no longer relevant. So for example, when I have ever changed teams in my career, if I’m using Slack or Workplace or Messenger, it’s very common to say, “hey guys, I’m out. I’m changing teams. I’m going to miss you.”And then you leave the group and you move on. I did the same with this group that I have on Messenger for this foundation that I’m part of. I changed committees. It was no longer relevant. I expressed that I’m leaving and why I’m leaving and then I left. And so I think that’s generally the common case, but I’m sure that there are cultural tendencies or new nuances that are coming up where people are using the features to mean other things. I think we’ll just learn over time what our users want and adjust the features to that.

One of the things that we offer is the ability to mute a conversation, so if it is too noisy, you don’t have to feel like you’re rude by leaving the conversation. You can just pause and disengage and let it not bother you. I think we’re still learning a bunch of those things.

Ashley: Have you ever experimented with product features, like giving people a prompt to answer why they’re leaving? Or anything to give the other participants in a chat a reason?