WhatsApp’s ‘Endless Stream Of Consciousness’ vs Threaded Topics
In a WhatsApp group, all the discussion is a single long stream. This can make it exceedingly difficult to have nuanced and complex professional discussions. Just two users talking about different things at the same time can create a confusing jumble of text, misapprehensions, and even unecessary disagreements. Search is possible but relies on knowing the exact term you are looking for, and even if found, will still not result in one readable thread of debate on that one issue.
Compare this with a proper threaded forum such as Discourse, in which you can have Topics for each of the issues you are discussing. These can be long-lived discussions, preserving all the nuance and thought of contributors over months and years.
Work Life Balance Becomes Impossible
Many of us use WhatsApp for day-to-day conversations with friends and family, social planning, and personal discussions. Adding professional conversations into this mix can make it very hard to ‘switch off’ from work - if you are getting WhatsApp ‘pings’ in the evening while relaxing you have no way of knowing if this is a chat from friends and family - or just a late-running debate in your work-related WhatsApp. Weekends, holidays, and any other time off work become peppered with work-related interruptions.
Using the forum for these discussions keeps them safely encapsulated in this forum, with notifications about activity going to your work email. It allows you to fully remove yourself from work related discussions when you want to.
Meta Invades Your Privacy
Although the content of WhatsApp messages is end-to-end encrypted, Meta can still see who you communicate with and they use this, combined with your actions everywhere across the Internet, to profile you according to who you communicate with.
In the best case scenario, this simply pollutes your existing Meta ad-tracking information and ‘social graph’ with work contacts, whom you may only know professionally, and this will start to affect your experience of other Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook. For example, this can start to blur the lines between who you know socially and professionally, with work contacts that you do not ‘know’ personally turning up as suggested ‘Facebook Friends’.
In the worst case scenario, this could expose you to unwanted targeted advertising, spam, and being inaccurately profiled within Meta and other companies, agencies, and organisations which Meta sells your data to.
Discourse forums do no tracking at all and are not connected to any external analytics, profiling, or ad-tech platforms. It exists to provide a safe space for professional discussion, peer support, career development, and education.
You Have To Use Your Personal Phone Number
There is no way to use WhatsApp without it being tied to your personal phone number. This means anyone you are in a WhatsApp group with can see your personal phone number and could contact you directly if they wanted to, even if this would be professionally inappropriate.
Discourse only uses email to send you notifications about activity in the forum. Other users cannot see your email address. You phone number is not known to the platform because we simply don’t have it. Users can send Private Messages to each other on the forum, which can be very helpful in that it allows direct communication without either of you haveing to divulge your email address or phone number. And you can switch off the Private Message function easily with one checkbox.
There’s No Archival or Proper Information Governance
Using a personal device, mobile phone number, and encrypted WhatsApp conversations for important discussions for an organisation or group means that there is no way to archive the important debate and discussions that are had. Decisions taken in a past ‘WhatsApp era’ just disappear, leaving no trace.
Is Portability and Mobile Device Use Really An Advantage?
WhatsApp is native to the mobile phone and makes it easy to stay in touch while away from a computer. However this in itself comes with drawbacks due to ‘perennial availability’. It is OK to be ‘Away From Keyboard’. We all have lives.
For its part, a Discourse forum can be ‘installed’ to a mobile phone as a PWA (Progressive Web App), which will make it behave a little more like a native phone ‘app’, but crucially it will not enable mobile push notifications unless you explicitly set these to be enabled. So you won’t find Discourse interrupting your Sunday dinner or family movie night.
Most of the discussions that professionals need to be involved in are long-form and best suited to reading and writing it on a proper screen and a proper keyboard anyway, so the ‘mobile advantage’ doesn’t really bring us any benefits in this setting.
What about Slack, Facebook Groups, or Discord?
A lot of the same drawbacks I’ve mentioned above apply to other common messaging platforms. Some are even worse than WhatsApp - for example Facebook Messenger harvest a VAST amount of information about users which Meta sells. Facebook Groups similarly data-mine your conversations and use it to sell you stuff via advertising.
[!warning] DiscoURSE is not anything to do with DiscoRD
Discord is a proprietary chat app which (at least initially) was aimed at online gamers, and is owned by a Chinese corporation. It has many features considered to be a risk to privacy and even national security. Discourse is completely unrelated, open source, forum platform.
The NHS is a piece of the UK’s critical national infrastructure and so we should be mindful of where NHS-related data is stored. Slack is limited by its freemium ‘hiding all your old messages’ behaviour, which seriously limits its utility.
Microsoft Teams has so many drawbacks when used as a ‘knowledge and conversation sharing space’ that it deserves its own article, which I will write shortly!
Discourse Chat
The Discourse forum platform has fairly recently added a new feature - Discourse Chat - which is a neat little addition which provides both group chat and DM facilities. If it’s enabled on your forum it’s visible in the top right as a 
‘speech bubble’ icon. Give it a try!
I’d be the first to admit that it’s not quite as feature-rich, fast, or easy to use as some of the competition, but on the plus side, its adware and tracking free, private, and already part of any Discourse forum.
Final Thoughts
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Use Signal for Chat: If - having read all of the above - you really still feel that a short-form chat app is a must for your needs, then I would recommend to use Signal, which is at least open source and not owned by Meta. Signal nevertheless still shares some of the disadvantages of WhatsApp relating to poor archival, absent threading etc.
I would suggest that using the forum as well as Signal gives you the advantages of both.
Here is a graphic showing a comparison of what data is linked to you, across several popular messaging platforms:
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Give Discourse a serious try: Discourse seems initially like it’s complex and different to platforms you’ve used before, but with a bit of familiarisation you can do everything you need here. If you can post on Facebook or operate Microsoft Word then you can easily manage Discourse. Explore the interface, your preferences, and make some posts… you’ll start to see how it works.
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Reach out to the Forum team: If you’re struggling with some aspect of using Discourse, do let us know what your difficulties are and we can help you to solve them. This is your forum, and we want to make it the best place to have discussions.
