Let’s face it, after ten years with us, WhatsApp has become a cornerstone of our social life. What a few years ago was solved with a simple phone call or a sad text message has been almost entirely replaced by the green messaging app. Such is the position that WhatsApp has acquired in our lives that sometimes its use can become tiresome. Yes, it’s true, WhatsApp is just a tool. By itself it is not annoying, what is annoying are certain kinds of users.
We all have more than one impatient contact in our contact list who demands immediate responses to their messages.
If more than five minutes goes by and you have not replied, they may take it as a personal affront. This type of contact doesn’t understand that you may have a life of your own, that you are doing other things, or simply that you don’t want to respond at the moment.
Don’t let anyone see you online
Who would have thought that we would end up yearning for the old Microsoft Messenger. The old messenger program had a handy option that allowed us to chat with our friends while appearing offline to everyone else. Something so simple and so easy is not available natively in WhatsApp. What we do have is a little trick to get a part of this functionality.
If we want to read a conversation without appearing online, the easiest solution is to activate airplane mode on our device. This way, the smartphone stops communicating with the Internet, so it doesn’t send a signal to your contacts that you are online.
Don’t let them know you listened to the audio
Surely you know what the WhatsApp double blue check is, and if not, we will explain it briefly. The double blue check are the two small V-shaped tick marks that appear next to your sent messages. When they turn from gray to blue, it means that your recipient has read the message. This option can easily be disabled in «Settings» > «Privacy», but what about audio messages?
There is a little trick to get around this privacy issue. To prevent your contact from knowing that you heard the audio message, simply forward it to a conversation you have with yourself and listen to it there. It’s as simple as that.
No one can add you to groups
Ah, the WhatsApp groups! They are the closest thing in the digital world to what you hear in a crowded bar. They may be fun at first, but in the long run they are hell. And hell gets even worse when you have several active WhatsApp groups. Fortunately, WhatsApp allows us to put certain limits on being added to groups without our permission.
To limit being added to groups we go into «Settings» > «Privacy» > «Groups». Within this section we can choose who can add us to a group: «everyone», «my contacts», or «everyone in the selected contact list». Praise the silence.
