Why BeReal is breaking out

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After two years of slowly climbing, a social network is starting to break through. Bereal combines nostalgia for social apps that came before with an anxiety about the world those apps created. It is impossible to say how big BeReal will grow or how long it will last, but it is generating legitimate enthusiasm.

BeReal was founded in January 2020 by the French developer. Users have two minutes to take their pictures after the app sends out a push notification. In a similar fashion to the Frontback app, the camera takes selfies and rear-facing photos at the same time. Your photos are marked as late if you post after the two minutes have expired. I remember when Facebook used the post-to-view gimmick for Slingshot.

It is a relatively simple set of features. BeReal became the top free app in the app store on Monday. A spokesman for Sensor Tower told me that it has been installed 20 million times. There were 333,000 downloads of BeReal on Sunday.

BeReal is a work in progress. After 18 months after it was founded, and with some traction with college students, the company received a $30 million round of funding from the two investment firms. Growth spiked earlier this year as young people began discussing the app heavily on TikTok, with many posts about BeReal getting 500,000 likes or more.

The enthusiasm has begun to spill over to the social networking site. Imagine Be Real on 9/11.

At the end of Call Me By Your Name, there is an imagined Be Real post.

I don't think you can understate the value of the yellow caution symbol in distinguishing the brand, they make every post about Be Real funnier than it would otherwise be. It's for example:

[during sex] omg babe it’s time to ⚠️BeReal⚠️

— chag (@TheChadYoumans) July 16, 2022

The investors have seen all the attention. In May, Insider reported that BeReal is raising $85 million in capital and that it will be worth $600 million. At a time when venture capitalists are more cautious, that is a big milestone for a company with no revenue.

What kind of business does Be Real hope to start? The company told me that he is not doing interviews right now. They sent along a two-page fact sheet about the company.

BeReal is a place for people to share their lives with friends. It is our goal to make people feel good about themselves. An alternative to addictive social networks is what we want.

There is a section labeled "BeReal can be addictive," "BeReal will frustrate you," and "BeReal won't make you famous." I can only imagine how withering that must have sounded in the original French, if the company's statement was true.

What is the reason for all this? Over the past two decades, we've learned a lot about how to start new social networks. BeReal's two-minute timer has inspired similar ingenuity because of a creative constraint. The company has a focus on making inroads with college students.

Every new social network nostalgically craves for a time when only your closest friends were on it, when you were free to be yourself. A new network can take a long way with that feeling and pride.

All of this undersells just how weird BeReal can be. I don't think I've ever seen such a mundane collection of media in my entire life as I have while browsing Be

A person is on a computer. A friend feeds his dog. A person is looking at a wall of faces.

It was a bunch of people posting about what they were having for breakfast. There is no sense in making a joke out of the fact that people are posting their breakfast on Be Real.

It's intentional that the mundanity is present. Though people are making good jokes about doing just that, the two-minute time limit is meant to discourage you from rigging up your ring light and taking yourself from the perfect angle.

A friend of mine told me that the appeal of the app is that it is ugly. He said that he didn't accept many friend requests because he was afraid that the app would be used for more than one purpose. He told me that he loved the BeReal feed. Adding people you're happy to look shitty in front of is the main ingredient.

It makes sense to me, since I rarely look at what my friends are posting and am bored by them. For the rare days when I am not sitting in my office chair, I post my own shitty content.

There are many theories about why BeReal is doing well. The app is on the rise at the same time as I am seeing more and more angst about the future of the photo sharing app. It seems like something like this pops up once a week.

The new Instagram update really understood what I was looking for:

- none of my friends’ content

- reposted TikToks from meme accounts I do not follow

- 100x more ads

- everything played at full volume against my will

— Meg Watson (@msmegwatson) July 14, 2022

When it came to seeing what your friends were doing, you could see what your friends were doing on IG. The app is turning into a feed of recommended posts with affiliate links because of TikTok's dominance. BeReal has a chance to grow.

Ryan Broderick thinks BeReal is part of the same trend as Wordle. He said that the simultaneous push alert and time limit to post offer a brief online experience. Taylor Lorenz is a writer for the Washington Post.

Broderick is correct that the hint of a universal experience is what makes it appealing. HQTrivia used a similar trick to invite everyone to play a game at the same time every day. There are apps that try to duplicate the logic of appointment tv.

HQTrivia flamed out as soon as it became popular. The idea of everyone posting BeReals at the same time is fun in theory, but most of my friends post late, and I rarely even look at their posts.

Where does Be Real go from here? I wrote about my pop-up restaurant theory in the past.

Every year or so, a promising new social network bubbles up to the surface. You can probably name the biggest of these: Mastodon, Peach, Ello. I’ve come to think of them as pop-up restaurants. Their arrival in the neighborhood stirs momentary excitement among the early-adopter crowd, who enjoy the novelty of the experience and the sensation of being first. But pop-up restaurants are not built to last, and a few weeks later everyone goes back to eating Chipotle.

The rise of Vero was the reason for the post to be written. The BeReal app seems to hit a lot of the same things that those apps did, such as changing a few things you've seen before with a few things you haven't, and hoping for the best.

The novelty of that two-minute timer will fade sooner than anyone at Be Real will hope. The developers have to keep shipping to build out the feature set and fix the many bugs while their users are still paying attention. Since interest in it peaked, the last pop-up social network to brief break out, has learned over and over again.

Even if BeReal succeeds, it's easy to imagine other platforms copying its core mechanic. If six months from now, you get a push notification that says "It'sInstagram O'Clock", you will know BeReal is still a threat.

I am enjoying my new day. Only friends who I am happy to look at in front of will be added. I wouldn't be able to say that I'm being realistic. I am enjoying my time on this app.