"Alarm Rang Nonstop, Causing Stress"
The number of people using KakaoTalk’s ‘Quietly Leave Group Chat’ feature surpassed 2 million within three weeks of its launch.
According to Kakao on the 6th, approximately 2 million users activated the ‘Quietly Leave Group Chat’ feature in KakaoTalk Labs from the feature’s introduction on the 10th of last month until the 31st of the same month.
However, Kakao explained, “Since Labs features are activated flexibly and frequently change, it is not possible to specify an exact number.”
Users who update KakaoTalk to the latest version can select the ‘Quietly Leave Group Chat’ option in Labs. When this option is selected and a user leaves a group chat, the message ‘OOO has left’ is not displayed to other participants.
The ‘Quietly Leave Group Chat’ feature was developed as part of Kakao’s 2023 year-round project ‘Kakao Easy’ (Kakao Easy). ‘Kakao Easy’ focuses on reducing users’ conversation stress and burden while enhancing convenience in daily life.
After the feature’s release, Kakao anticipated that “users who experienced discomfort from unnecessary messages and notifications in group chats that had become inactive or where they missed the right timing to leave will have reduced stress.”
In fact, positive reactions have generally continued since the feature’s launch. On various communities and social media (SNS), posts such as “I was stressed by constant notifications like greetings and job change news,” and “I had been enduring it because of relationships with people, but as soon as the quietly leave feature was introduced, I immediately left the chat room” have been posted one after another.
Meanwhile, starting with this update, Kakao plans to continuously add features throughout the year to reduce user stress. Features such as easily turning off notifications or customizing notification methods according to user situations are among them.
Kakao is attempting service improvements reflecting user feedback with the goal of ‘making communication between people and between people and technology closer and safer.’
Representative examples include ‘Accept/Reject Unknown Friend Group Chat Invitations,’ which confirms acceptance when a user not in the friend list is invited to a group chat; improved usability of ‘Scheduled Messages’ by removing scheduled message indicators; and the introduction of the ‘Talk Siren’ feature for user safety.
Hong Eun-taek, CEO of Kakao, stated last month, “Although KakaoTalk has grown with the love of many citizens, with the number of messages sent over the past 10 years reaching 7.6 trillion, the explosive increase in the volume of conversations, communication purposes, and diversity of relationships in conversations seems to have increased user inconvenience and burden. We will continue to reflect various improvements to enhance satisfaction and convenience.”
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