90% Say "Automatic Exposure of Friends' Updates Is Fatiguing"
8 Out of 10 Prefer the Old Version
KakaoTalk recently revamped its "Friends Tab," introducing a new feature that automatically displays changes to friends' profiles and activity history. However, user response has been lukewarm. Nine out of ten users reported feeling fatigued, saying, "I am tired of seeing information I don't want to know."
According to the results of an online survey released by the Korea Press Foundation on November 11, 90.1% of respondents who used the updated version of the KakaoTalk Friends Tab said, "I feel fatigued because I end up seeing news I am not particularly interested in."
With this update, KakaoTalk now automatically displays friends' personal activity history, such as changes to profile photos or status messages. However, users pointed out that this leads to "stress due to excessive exposure of information."
Additionally, 90.9% of respondents said, "I feel uncomfortable because my activities could be exposed to people I am not close to." In contrast, only a relatively small portion responded positively, with 20.9% saying, "It's convenient to interact with friends through likes or comments," and 20.5% saying, "I can see friends' updates at a glance." Overall, 79.7% of users said they would like to revert to the previous version before the update.
Regarding the feature that extends the time allowed to delete messages in chat rooms from the previous 5 minutes to 24 hours, 84.3% responded positively, saying, "It's reassuring to be able to correct mistakes." However, concerns were also raised, with 67.5% saying, "The delete function could be abused to evade responsibility," and 50.6% saying, "It could undermine trust in conversations."
As for KakaoTalk's attempt to transition from a messenger to a full-fledged social networking service (SNS) by strengthening its artificial intelligence (AI) features and introducing ChatGPT, 86.1% said, "There are too many features, making it complicated." Some respondents also said, "It's a natural progression given the media environment" (61.2%), and "It's more convenient" (38.1%).
This survey was conducted online from October 29 to November 2 among 1,000 people in their 20s to 60s who have experience using KakaoTalk.
Meanwhile, on November 7, Kakao CEO Chung Jinah stated during the third-quarter earnings conference call, "Based on user feedback, we will continue to improve our services, including the planned Friends Tab revamp in the fourth quarter." Chung emphasized, "Since this KakaoTalk update is the largest in the 15 years since the service was launched, we will gather a wide range of feedback to simultaneously enhance the messaging experience and strengthen platform stability."
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
