Comparing BeReal to Instagram is missing the point
A college professor I know was recently on a school trip to Rome. He and his group of students would be out eating dinner together when suddenly the conversation would die down, and the students would all pull out their phones and snap a photo. He quickly figured out that the students were all receiving a notification from the photo-sharing app BeReal at the same time.
Chances are, if you’ve read about BeReal, it’s because it’s being heralded as the photo app that could soon dethrone Instagram. The Independent, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, and Ad Age have all published stories within the past month declaring BeReal the “anti-Instagram.” But to reduce BeReal’s popularity to an Instagram replacement is to miss the whole point of why it’s growing so quickly. It’s not the act of sharing a photo that’s important; it’s the synchronicity and the fact it’s largely private. A better comparison would be Wordle, the mega viral word game that you can only play once a day. Both apps deploy a simple daily prompt to build a little online ritual you can talk about with your friends. And both apps are also part of a massive shift in the way we use the internet.
Related
During the peak of millennial social media use, people were following anyone on huge public social platforms like Twitter and Instagram. But newer apps rising to the top of the app store, like BeReal, tend to emphasize more private online connections that help young people find intimate shared digital experiences in a fractured online world. The success of BeReal — with almost 3 million daily active users as of April — is a sign that a more personal internet is coming, whether Silicon Valley is ready for it or not.
“It’s like humane tech. [BeReal] attempts to free
Read more on polygon.com
