While Facebook rules the social media domain in India with about 2.9 billion users, WhatsApp follows it closely with 431 million users, far surpassing other popular platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. This instant-messenger platform has nowadays become somewhat of a necessity in households as well as other institutions today. Keeping all that in mind, it’s no wonder that the popularity of group chats is growing on the platform.
Every community – be it a classroom, a college batch, or an office department- forms groups on this platform to communicate and share information seamlessly. The rising popularity of groups has also resulted in more queries and questions about the same.
In today’s blog, we’re going to target one such query – When you add someone to a WhatsApp group, can they see previous messages?
If you’ve been looking for an answer to this query, your search ends here. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about it. Let’s get started!
When You Add Someone to Whatsapp Group, Can They See Previous Messages?
Without further ado, we’ll get to the point. Your query today is whether or not can someone who is added to a WhatsApp group access previous messages, right?
Just to clarify, by previous messages here, we’re referring to the messages exchanged in the group before this particular user joined it. In this case, the answer to your query is: No.
All members of a WhatsApp group are given access to only those messages and media files that were shared after they joined. They have no way of going back to view previous messages.
So, if you’re worried about adding someone to your group who might react poorly to its older conversations, you can rest assured. Unless an older participant decides to share those with them (in the form of screenshots), they have no way of checking those on their own.
How to add someone to a WhatsApp group?
While we’re on the subject of WhatsApp groups, we’ll give you a quick walk-through about the action you’re supposed to take – adding a new participant to your group. There are two ways of doing that:
1. You can either add them directly by opening the Group Info tab, finding the Participants list, and adding them using the Add Participants option.
2. Alternatively, you could also invite them into this group using an invite link. This option is placed right below the Add Participants one, with a link of chain icon drawn next to it. As soon as they click on this link, they’d be added to the group.
In case you’re not an admin of this group, you have two choices. You can either reach out to the current admin and tell them to add this particular user. Or you could forego all the hassle and ask them to make you an admin as well. The latter will be a handier solution if you need to add new people often.
How are WhatsApp groups different from WhatsApp communities?
Now that we’ve learned everything we needed to know about adding new members to a WhatsApp group and its consequences, let’s proceed to another feature the platform launched recently.
But why are we talking about this new feature out of the blues, you ask? Well, because while it was launched in 2022, its functions have a lot in common with WhatsApp groups. As most of you would have gathered by now, we’re talking about WhatsApp Communities.
So, while both groups and communities on WhatsApp have multi-participant usage, how are they different from each other? And if they aren’t, why did WhatsApp need to launch the latter when we already had WhatsApp groups?
First things first: while both groups and communities aim at multi-user interaction, they both serve different purposes. Groups are a collection of various users, while communities are a collection of various groups.
In that sense, you could call them mega-groups. In other words, they’re an umbrella under which multiple groups are included. Over 50 different groups can be added to a single community; its participant limit is set at 5,000 users.
Another important difference between WhatsApp groups and communities is their extent of interaction. In a group, all participants can share messages and media files with each other – unless someone has been restricted by the group admin.
On the other hand, communities offer more of a one-way communication, wherein only the admin can send messages. This might make you realize the main goal of communities – to share a message with a large audience at once. Hence, the two are separate entities on the platform.
Other features launched alongside WhatsApp Communities
Although it has been over a year of WhatsApp Communities’ launch, some users of the platform are still clueless about it. If you were one of those, we hope that the explanation above would have raised your awareness about it.
This might come as a surprise to you, but WhatsApp introduced three other new features alongside Communities in its April 2022 update. How much do you know about these updates? Even if you don’t, we’re here to familiarize you with them. Let’s get started:
In-group polls: Reaching a decision – be it of what movie to watch or where to plan the next trip – is not an easy task, especially in a WhatsApp group. Every second member here has their own opinions about what’s best, which is how conflicts and arguments often arise.
In order to resolve this issue once and for all, WhatsApp has launched in-group polls. These polls help all group members express their views (in favor of or against a cause0 in an organized and hassle-free manner via voting, making the decision-making process that much easier and more peaceful.
Conference video calls with up to 32 participants:
Before the April 2022 update, WhatsApp users could add up to 8 participants in a single conference call.
While this feature was more than enough for some users, there were others who found it dissatisfying. Having a large family or group of friends, all living apart, they wanted a way to be able to connect with them all at once.
To cater to the needs of these users, WhatsApp decided to push the conference video call limitations even further. Instead of doubling the number, they multiplied it four times; as a result, you can now add up to 32 members in a single call.
Now, how you manage to see so many people at once on your smartphone’s screen is an issue you must deal with yourself; the executives on WhatsApp’s end have done their job.
Group participation limit exceeded:
We’re sure this is something you’d not be expecting; WhatsApp had just raised the bar for participants of group chats back in 2021; it was 512 people in a group.
Well, guess what? Since April 2022, the number has doubled yet again. Now, over 1024 people can be added to a single group. Isn’t that just great?
The end note
With this, we’re ready to wrap things up. We’ve talked at length about WhatsApp groups today. Our focus was on solving your query of whether a new joiner can see previous messages; only to find out that they can’t.
Moving forward, we explored how new participants can be added to a group and what to do if you’re not a group admin. Toward the end, we compared WhatsApp groups to Communities – a recent feature WhatsApp launched in April 2022, which bears several similarities to groups.
Do you have other queries about WhatsApp groups that you’d like us to resolve? Tell us about them in the comments section below!
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