Edit:
Sry for the low image quality, I rescaled my screenshot to get it below the 100kb media upload limit of my instance and it looked fine in the gallery. I should have outsourced my upload...
It's a relatively new social media app. Once a day you have 2 minute timer where you can take a picture. All your friends post at the same time.
The idea is that you post what you do at the moment without prepering much. You don't post the best pics or try to pretend that lots of intresting stuff happens in your life, but what you actually do in the moment.
The problem is monetisation. You don't use the app much longer than a minute a day and it doesn't have any ads. So I don't know how low they're able to do this without shutting down
And if you don't have any friends IRL that use it, it's pretty boring
That's only true when they are truly unprepared. What actually happens is that people just take a prepared shot in the moment. You usually have a big enough time window anyway and you can submit late.
It's actually more fun. You also get rewarded with two extra pictures you can take whenever you want if you post on time and get blamed when you post a late by telling everyone you were late and how much you were late.
They could make you watch an ad to take your BeReal. They’d have to sell the one spot for a lot though. And people are already too lazy to take the pic when they’re supposed to a lot so they’d probably just lose most of their members.
You get a random notification every day to publish a photo (camera only). You can upload 3 pictures if your first one has been published (I think) 2 minutes after you received the notification to upload. Else you can only publish one photo per day.
I guess the idea is to show your friends what you are currently doing without giving you time to prepare yourself / your environment...
Maybe because the concept is antithetical to stuff like Instagram, which makes it fun and refreshing - you know seeing "real" stuff and not highly filtered and planned stuff all the time.
People already do this with instagram for over a decade, it's called finstagram. You create an account under a fake name, and only add intimate friends, set it to private. At which point you post pictures of you taking a shit, being ugly or doing anything you're too ashamed to put on your actual instagram. Ironically the fake instagram ("finstagram") is more real than your actual insta.
Think semi-famous hot people. Actual insta: curated photoshopped pictures. Finsta: picture of what they look like 1st thing in the morning with no make up, or of them doing drugs.
Different guy but I share in his confusion. I guess I don't understand why people like Instagram either. For me it got old almost immediately and the ads on the Instagram app were worse than anything else I've ever used to this day. I just don't see the appeal and much less so for a knock-off.
Because many gen-z people are pushing back on the relationship us millennials have with social media, and find the attitude that Instagram encourages (curating and showing the best version of your life) unhealthy and anxiety-inducing. So this is an Instagram with no FOMO.
I don't use BeReal and barely use Instagram but I totally see the point. Instagram is quite unhealthy.
I got talked into using it for a little while, and it's actually nice. You get a little snippet of your friends' lives, which can be nice especially when you're scattered around in different places. But there's none of the bullshit reality of Instagram - 90% of the posts is just random shit like doing the dishes, working, or not getting out of bed even though it's past noon.
Sometimes posts make for actual conversation starters, other times you'll get a bunch of people responding with a heart eye emoji to your picture of a laptop and a cup of coffee. It's just refreshingly dumb. And there's no algorithms.
Kind of! Except that nothing you post will be public the day after and it's generally only seen by your friends anyway, making it less embarrassing in retrospect. But the sense of awkward intimacy is actually somewhat comparable to Facebook back when people had no idea how to use it.