The photos don’t need to be exciting: “It could be anything,” she says, “depending on where you are.” And it really is anything: friends share their BeReals at the shops, at the beach, at uni, and in bed. No place is off-limits, no post is too boring — in fact, that’s the point.
Another BeReal user Tom Dunbabin, 23, has been on the app for a month.
“If the expectation is that the content is going to be boring, then you don’t need to put in any effort,” explains the Canberra university student.
“My girlfriend came to me one day and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this cool new app which my housemates and I use.’ She’s like, ‘I know no one else except my housemates. You gotta get on it.’ So I got on it,” he recounts. “I added her and her housemates. And then some of my other friends got it. And now we’re connected.”
BeReal sends a notification at a random time each day, giving users two minutes to take a photo of what they’re up to.Credit:
Dunbabin’s “boring” experience is what the creators of the app would be attempting to emphasise, suggests Dr Brad Ridout, a behavioural psychologist and deputy chair of the Cybersecurity Research Group at Sydney University.
There’s been “a striving for perfection in every post that Instagram has encouraged over the past few years,” Ridout says. But “perfection is the enemy of happiness. So, an app like BeReal is reflecting the pendulum swinging back away from perfectionism and towards authenticity.”
Authenticity happens when people feel comfortable enough to be themselves, he says, which means it is fostered by having a much smaller circle of connections on the platform.
He cites research that suggests there is a connection between instances of depression and the number of strangers users follow on Instagram. “So influencers and celebrities kind of give this distorted view of people’s lives.”
Most of the users the Herald and the Age spoke to had far fewer connections on BeReal than they did on Instagram — only around 10. That is a reflection of the greater intimacy fostered by the nature of the app (there’s a catch: you can only see what your friends have posted once you’ve shared your BeReal for the day), and the still-tiny number of users the app holds compared to its competition.
Many apps have experienced the flash in the pan growth that some say BeReal is currently undergoing, Clubhouse, HQ, Casey Neistat’s Beme and HouseParty among them.
So what will it take for this newest entrant to succeed, intentionally avoiding most of the features that made the other apps so successful?
“Its whole premise is that you have to contribute to be able to consume,” says Joseph Russell, founder of app development agency, DreamWalk, and dating app Out There. “This may seem novel right now but it will be very difficult for them to keep users engaged without changing to a more content-consumer focused model,” he says.
But the app may be deemed a success the same way TikTok and Snapchat have been: if Facebook attempts to copy it.
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This ‘influencer-free’ social media app is taking on Instagram – can BeReal make it big?
Source: Philippines Alive
