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Why BeReal won’t last much longer
Posted by on September 25, 2022 at 3:28 pmWith the tagline, “Your Friends for Real” BeReal promises to take away all the fakeness and bring back authenticity in social media.
As of August, BeReal has 21.6 million monthly active users since being released in 2020 and in mid 2022, it became the #1 downloaded app in the app store in the U.S. for social networking. Downloads have grown 315%, with 65% of these lifetime downloads happening in the Q1 2022.
And people are responding positively towards that idea, especially zoomers being majority of the users
**Because society is tired of the influencer lifestyle**
Promoting itself as “not another social network” and “the anti-instagram” can appeal to certain people and give a breath of fresh air from all the glamorous lifestyles and highlights that people try to portray, but it gives off an uncomfortable truth for most of us.
That real life is boring.
And whether it’s real or not, people don’t want boring when they use social media as an escape from their reality. While we’re shifting away from online perfection, it’s human nature for people to always compare themselves to others.
All it’ll take is for one BeReal post to show your friends at an enviable destination and then comes the game of jealousy and competition.
People, as well as brands on the app, will end up trying too hard to “be real” and when they do, people will see right through it.
BeReal wouldn’t be so popular if there wasn’t a demand for authenticity. But here’s the main difference from other social apps:
**It goes against social nature**
The most popular social apps have a few traits in common that make it fun to use, as well as addicting.
1. They let people be free
Every other social app lets you use it when you want, not when you’re told to.
But BeReal puts constraints on you with the one post per day at a time *they* choose, not you. It’s like calls on the house phone (if you’re old enough to remember those) where you have to pick up with the anxiety of not knowing who’s on the other line.
With their 2-minute timer that can pop anytime during the day, causing people to stop everything they’re doing and scrambling to get the decent light, presentable background, and take an acceptable selfie in those 2 minutes.
What kind of app experience would it be if the alert goes off before or after you do something exciting?
2. People want to show off what makes them look good, not always what’s real.
In the book *Contagious*, Jonah Berger goes in-depth on why people share things in the first place.
People care about how they look to others. They want to seem smart, cool, well-informed, and show things that have some type of value.
So when people share their life on social media, they want to represent themselves well.
And the same goes in real life. For example, if someone’s room is a mess, they might be ok living with it for a few days or weeks. But the moment someone is coming over, they clean their room to not *appear* like a slob.
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1 Reply
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All of your alleged issues are things that existed when BeReal launched and it continued to climb.
The fact they’re continuing to gain users and attention in spite of it shows that you’re not the grand expert in psychology you think you are.
The app even sprang from a desire to avoid the things you claim is “all people want” and they all joined on that premise. There’s a movement of people who share openly and proudly, “this is how life is” instead of trying to be another fake influencer with some curated artificial life.
>And whether it’s real or not, people don’t want boring when they use social media as an escape from their reality.
There is no evidence that most social media users are doing so to escape from reality. At all.
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Funny cause I literally just deleted the app the other day. The content is completely lame and really after a couple months it was just a non-rewarding PITA to try to post when they sent the note (and not allowing you to view your friends lame shite if you didn’t). No thanks! There’s a thousand other more rewarding ways to waste time.
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I think it will hit a plateau, just like Snapchat did.
But it’s not beyond recovery yet.For me the time constraint is the biggest issue, it will alienate a lot of potential users.
But I think the selfie thing is really good and having to post something to “unlock” content it’s a really interesting take, it promotes a “fairness” and discourages “voyeuristic” social media.
My guess is that Instagram or TikTok will take some of those features and improve on them.
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BeReal just took over an unfilled niche that everyone was craving for.
Why it’s working: because it takes 2 minutes to participate and you’re participating with people you know.
Will the popularity wane? Who knows, that’s guessing the future. It’s quite easy to say “it’s popular, and then it’ll plateau, and then it’ll be less popular” that’s just the cycle of everything.
I think it depends most on company pivots and competition how fast the arc happens.
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You nailed it regarding human nature.
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Yeah…I take about 50 photos and post the 1 pic that turns out “acceptable” for public display and then whenever anyone comments “omg you look so pretty, how do you always look so good?!” I flat out tell them “I gave it 50 shots and finally posted the one that would ensure this comment, DUH!”
I’m definitely not down with an app telling me to stop, drop and post my chin rolls whenever I’m called on. This isn’t middle earth calling people for a quest, so forget that demanding vanity promptness..my ego is posted on my schedule only.
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I’ve been using BeReal for a few weeks and yesterday I realized that I don’t really care to scroll the feed of my friends posts – but I do enjoy scrolling the Discovery tab of the app to see little glimpses of peoples day from around the world. It’s been a nice way for me to feel the nostalgia of Chatroulette sans the Turkish dicks that would always seem to turn up and ruin the fun.
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I agree with this.
I believe TikTok’s initial appeal related to how people eschewed the “perfection” required on IG to instead provide something more relatable, raw, fun/goofy, and organic. There was also the discoverability factor: anyone could go viral. I watched my first clients go from 0 to almost a million on the platform.
But now it’s become far more corporate, and the endless updates are pulling TikTok away from its primary driver: short videos. It’s becoming like IG and FB: desperately trying to be everything, but losing that original essence that attracted people to it in the first place. Now I find people join mostly as its become so overwhelmingly mainstream, and folks are willing to swipe past the stupid TikTok Stories and loads of ads to access the content by their favorite creators.
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