WhatsApp is reportedly working on an auto-mute feature for large group chats. The Meta-owned chat company that recently announced larger group chats with up to 1024 participants now plans to automatically mute group chats that have more than 256 participants.
A WaBetaInfo report states that WhatsApp is rolling out this feature to some beta testers. Describing the feature, the report states that user who’ve received this update will see an alert announcing that the group has been automatically muted to “help reduce notifications.”
“Since this is a large group, you may receive more notifications than you expect: thanks to this feature, those groups will be automatically muted when they reach a lot of participants. Since you are always in control over your groups and notifications, you can restore notifications for a muted group chat at any time,” mentions the report.
Catching on with every information in a large group chat can be a little tricky especially if it has large number of members. Also, the continuous incoming of messages can be very distracting at times. While WhatsApp allows you to manually mute individual of group chats for up to 8 hours, or 1 week or forever, the latest update automatically mutes the groups that it detects has more than 256 members. So even if you miss out to mute large group chats, WhatsApp ensures you are not bothered by bombarding of messages.
This feature is currently rolling out to only beta users and a wider roll out is expected soon.
Talking about the features for beta users, WhatsApp is also rolling out self-chat feature to beta users. The new feature allows you to chat with yourself by creating a single-person chat window. Those received the feature can access it by going to the contacts page and looking for contact that says “Me” with “Message Yourself” mentioned below it.
