7 reasons why Whatsapp Communities fail to work.

Have you ever witnessed an accident that happened during busy traffic hours? Have you noticed that most of the people just stand around and gawk at the altercation but there would be hardly anyone to help sort it out.

The same phenomenon may be playing out in communities on social media, albeit under much benign circumstances.

In this age when the majority of people on social media belong to multiple communities on FaceBook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack, and more, real help is hard to come by from these groups. People feel the apathy of communities they belong to more deeply than the ragers of a road-accident who are denied help by strangers.

It may not be far from the truth that Communities are dead on social media platforms. Here are the 7 reasons why Social media communities do not benefit its members:

1- Noise: ‘Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink!’ Coleridge’s words may be as true for his poem, as they are for social media, which is replete with information but deficient of meaningful information that an individual needs at a given moment.

2- More noise: Due to multiple social platforms and the constant humming of the digital society, advertisers, agenda-makers, activists, self-promoters, people have honed the art of switching off to strangers, and sometimes even friends, on social media.

3- Relevance: Communities built around genuine interests are the ones where one can find real advice based on expertise and experience, and such communities are far and few.

4- By-Stander effect: Due to the plethora of groups to which each individual belongs to, and the huge number of people in each group, an individual’s responsiveness suffers from ‘By-stander effect’. When someone asks for help from a large group, people assume that someone else will step-up and help, and ultimately no one helps.

5- Attention: Since there is too much noise, meaningless conversations, and advertisement going on in a community, experts often switch themselves off mentally and may miss out on calls for genuine help. This is why referrals and personally reaching out to an individual works better than seeking help from the same individual in a community set up.

6- Genuine connections: people join communities in a hope to forge meaningful connections with others motivated by the same interests or goal, but they end up switching off due to on-goings that are not relevant to them. This is why people are merely ‘registered’ on social media communities, but they are actually ‘present’ only amongst a close circle of people with whom they can connect personally.

7- If it is important, it should be personal: as people switch off to the voices on social media, they have become more biased to paying attention only to smaller groups of people who are close to them, like, very close friends, immediate colleagues, family, professionals or clients they regularly interact with, etc. Help and advice is increasingly becoming reserved for those with whom people have personal connections.