KakaoTalk recently revamped its "Friend Tab," introducing a new feature that automatically displays friends' profile changes and activity updates. However, user response has been cold. Nine out of ten users said, "I'm tired of seeing information I don't want to know," expressing their discomfort.

According to the results of an online survey released by the Korea Press Foundation on November 11, 90.1% of respondents using the revamped version of the KakaoTalk Friend Tab said they "feel fatigue from being exposed to news they are not particularly interested in."

KakaoTalk with Newly Updated Features. KakaoTalk Official Website

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With this update, KakaoTalk now automatically exposes personal activity updates such as changes to friends' profile photos or status messages. However, users pointed out that this "excessive exposure to information causes stress."

Additionally, 90.9% of respondents said they "feel uncomfortable that their activities could be exposed to people they are not close to." On the other hand, only a relatively small portion gave positive responses, such as "It's convenient to interact with friends through hearts or comments" (20.9%) and "It's easy to see friends' updates at a glance" (20.5%). A total of 79.7% of all users said they would like to revert to the previous version before the update.

Online Survey on KakaoTalk Revamp by Korea Press Foundation. Yonhap News

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Regarding the extension of the message deletion window in chat rooms from 5 minutes to 24 hours, 84.3% of respondents evaluated it positively, saying it "provides peace of mind by allowing mistakes to be corrected." However, there were also negative perspectives and concerns, with 67.5% saying "the deletion feature could be abused to evade responsibility" and 50.6% worried that "it could undermine trust in conversations."

As for KakaoTalk's attempt to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) features and integrate ChatGPT, thereby shifting from a messenger to a full-fledged social networking service (SNS), 86.1% responded that "the platform has become too complicated with too many features." Some respondents also said "it is a natural progression given the media environment" (61.2%) and "it is 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, Kakao CEO Jeong Shina said during the third-quarter earnings conference call held on November 7, "Based on user feedback, we will continue to improve our services, including the Friend Tab revamp scheduled for the fourth quarter." She emphasized, "Since this KakaoTalk revamp is the largest in 15 years since the service launched, we will gather a wide range of feedback to both enhance the messaging experience and strengthen platform stability."