“Time to BeReal. 2 minutes left to capture a BeReal and see what your friends are up to!”
BeReal is a social media app initially released in 2020 that gained popularity in early 2022. It originally spread on college campuses, then to people all across the world. By April 2022, BeReal had 2.93 million active daily users. In August they had over 10 million active daily users, which is a 29200% increase from the previous year. They claim to have a goal of getting to over 100 million users like other popular social media apps, such as Snapchat, which has 332 million active daily users. To many, this unbelievable increase in users shows promise for the future of the app.
However, others have started to wonder: is this quick rise in popularity just BeReal’s 15 minutes of fame? This unfortunate but common fall from fame has happened to many other popular apps and games in the past, such as the now cringe-worthy Among Us. Rebeca Ventura, a junior at B-CC, believes this will happen to BeReal. She downloaded BeReal at the start of the year, but deleted it less than a month later. “It was boring and repetitive,” Ventura stated. “I just don’t care what people are doing.” Many individuals feel similarly.
BeReal comes at a random time each day and users take a simultaneous front and back camera picture of what they are doing. But for some like Ventura, it is not any fun if they are not doing something interesting at that time, and it just gets repetitive to see everyone else post the same thing every day. “I would scroll through BeReal and everyone would be doing homework or something, every day.” People also often did not post on time, defeating the purpose of the app and causing even more repetitive BeReals.
Others simply stopped using the app when it did not interest them anymore. Shirin Ghorbani, a junior at B-CC, claims she “would go days at a time without posting.” She did not feel motivated to post at all unless she was doing something really fun, and at that point, posting on BeReal would be the same as posting your story on any other social media.