Each day last summer, a black-and-white notification
appeared simultaneously on millions of phone screens. As if in a trance, many
people paused their conversations or lowered their video game controllers. It
was time to BeReal.
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BeReal, a French photo-sharing app founded in 2020 that took
off on college campuses, prompts users at a different time each day to take
shots with their front and rear phone cameras. The app billed itself as an
alternative to the artifice of social media: If Instagram had become a catalog
of cosmetic enhancements and painstakingly arranged tableaus, BeReal’s feed
full of limp salads, messy apartments and unflattering selfies appeared an
attractive refuge. By July, BeReal had soared to the top of the iPhone app
store.
The spell seems to have broken. Some users have discovered
that seeing the monotony of their own lives reflected back at them is
compelling for only so long.
When Night Noroña, 17, a high school student in Redding,
California, downloaded the app in August, he liked seeing that his friends’
lives were less glamorous than the highlight reels they posted to Instagram
suggested, he said. But after a few months, he tired of scrolling through
nearly identical pictures of their laptop screens and deleted the app. Most of
his friends no longer use it either, he said.
“Gen Z hops on trains really fast, but they hop off even
faster,” Noroña said.
The app’s monthly downloads have been slipping since
September, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. The
number of people who use the app daily has dropped 61 percent from its peak,
from about 15 million in October to less than 6 million in March, according to
Apptopia, another analytics firm.
BeReal declined to comment for this article, and the company
does not share its numbers of users.
“We want for ourselves what we want for our users — not to
chase fame or the spotlight or to be tethered to metrics like the number of
followers or number of downloads,” reads a statement posted to the company’s
website in November.
The app does not allow users to see friends’ posts until
contributing their own. That made it feel collaborative at first, said Oriana
Riley, 20, a Stanford University student. In the fall, entire classrooms were
whipping out their iPhones in unison, she said.
Riley still uses the app but said it was well past the point
of academic interruption.
“It’s something to do, but it’s not the thing to
do anymore,” she said.
BeReal faces a quandary, said Niklas Myhr, an associate
professor of marketing at Chapman University. Doubling down on so-called
authenticity risks making the app more monotonous. But doing the opposite —
breaking the platform’s rules to generate more interesting pictures — risks
turning BeReal into the very platforms it was supposedly a reaction against.
BeReal may alienate users if it becomes awash in the kind of highly produced
content that influencers and advertisers typically post on Instagram and Facebook,
Myhr said. (BeReal is currently ad-free.)
Some users stretch the app’s rules. Last month Sondra
Tarmoedji, 31, a wedding photographer in Sacramento, California, got a BeReal
notification when she was in an Uber on the way to the first show of Taylor Swift’s
Eras Tour in Glendale, Arizona. She ignored it.
Tarmoedji resisted until Swift’s performance of “All Too
Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” to post.
“I can be a little bit late on my BeReal for the day, just
to show, Hey, I am doing something cool,” she said. (The app lets other users
know if you have posted late as well as how many times you retook your photo.)
Oliver Haimson, an assistant professor at the University of
Michigan, calls this phenomenon the online authenticity paradox. We consider
authenticity important but often fall short of achieving it in our digital
presences because, for example, we want to share exciting moments with others,
or we care what our followers think of us.
Those tendencies have made it hard for BeReal to live up to
its name.
“People were starting to realize that it’s not necessarily
this promise of authenticity and realness that they were expecting it to be,”
Haimson said.
Even if BeReal does not retain users, it appears to have
made an impression on other social media companies. In July, Instagram
introduced a dual camera feature. In September, TikTok introduced “TikTok Now,”
which instructs users each day to share a spontaneous photo or video.
And some BeReal users still see value in capturing the
mundane — if not for their followers, then for themselves. Sunny Tang, 23, a
medical student at New York University, uses BeReal to document artifacts from
her daily life, like her class notes on the esophagus. Sure, the images are
boring, she said. But that doesn’t mean they are meaningless.
“I’d rather remember these less significant moments, because
at the end of the day, those are the moments that will be making up my life,”
Tang said.
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