In 2020, an app called BeReal arrived on the scene, billing itself because the anti-Instagram. It aligned itself closely with the cultural zeitgeist, answering the growing call for ‘relatable’ content that had emerged out of anxieties about highly artificial and curated online content. The premise is as follows: the app sends a push notification to all its users at a random time every day, instructing them to “be real”. Then, they’ve a two-minute window to take an image using the app’s dual camera feature – which captures each their very own face and what they’re – wherever they’re, whatever they’re doing.

While to start out with, the app’s existence largely went under the radar, downloads of BeReal eventually skyrocketed, leaping from 1.1 million in February 2022 to an estimated 53 million by October in the identical yr. Its growth was largely driven by Gen Z, with under-25s making up almost 80 per cent of users in some markets.

But evaluation by various market intelligence firms this yr has suggested that each monthly downloads and day by day users at the moment are in decline. Based on analytics firm Apptopia, the number of people that use the app day by day has dropped 61 percent from its peak, from about 15 million in October 2022 to lower than six million in March 2023. The conversation around BeReal has develop into more jaded too. “BeReal going off at 10.30pm is it,” one X user wrote. “Suppose I higher obediently take an image of myself barely awake whilst laying down on the sofa watching TV alone in order that the one three friends I even have left who’re using it may possibly see.” But why have young people turned their backs on the app that was once the new recent thing?

For one, there’s a bossiness to the way in which wherein BeReal operates. It demands that you just post inside two minutes of the notification, or else it snitches on you to your folks. It also locks your feed until you might have posted your personal BeReal, like a parent bribing a baby. But young people don’t need to be parented by their social media. As Aisha Attah, 20, says, “I’m busy and prefer to use social media on my terms and in my very own time.” Amid a wealth of other apps you could engage with nevertheless you wish, BeReal can feel too very similar to exertions. 

BeReal going off at 10.30pm is it. Suppose I higher obediently take an image of myself barely awake whilst laying down on the sofa watching TV alone in order that the one 3 friends I even have left who’re using it may possibly see.

— Mike Townsend (@townsendyesmate) October 19, 2023

Dr Harry Dyer, digital sociologist and lecturer in education on the University of East Anglia, notes that by rushing people to post, BeReal may very well stress out a few of its users, particularly Gen Z. “There’s a tonne of research on Gen Z hating phone calls” because they find “the thought of getting to reply in that moment […] stressful”. BeReal, he says, may trigger the same response by calling for that very same type of in-the-moment communication. He also believes that in “gatekeeping” the experience of browsing until users have themselves posted, the app disregards “a extremely essential a part of why we use social media” – the will to ‘lurk’ and observe others while going unobserved ourselves.

One other corollary of blocking users’ feeds is that posting can begin to feel like mere housekeeping – an obstacle to be cleared somewhat than a precious type of self-expression in itself. This leads to non-committal content – half-captured faces, blank computer screens, random window frames, empty dinner plates – which quickly gets boring. The boredom users experience when confronted with the mundanities of their friends’ lives also exposes a fissure in our wider cultural appetite for relatable content: although relatability is widely known ‘intellectually’ or as an idea, as consumers we prefer relatability’s prettier, more polished cousin. A dimly-lit picture of an unmade bed, as an illustration, is too real. The Molly-Mae Hague brand of realness, nevertheless – the one which’s wearing designer loungewear and filmed in a spectacular multi-million-pound home – now that is a winner. 

Then, after all, there’s the well-documented issue that BeReal users routinely ignore the app’s entire premise because, as Samantha Hall, 25, says, there are “no real consequences” to posting late. “I feel like quite a lot of people began waiting until they were doing something fun to post,” she says.

bereal got boring real fast

— anto (@antittiess) February 4, 2023

Clearly, despite the clamour for ‘authenticity’ on social media platforms, young people don’t object to staged posts. Nevertheless it’s not something they need BeReal for, either from an observer’s perspective – “I could just use Instagram stories to see what everyone’s as much as!” Samantha tells me – or from a poster’s perspective. If users need to ditch the randomly timed posts and return to marketing themselves through posed, curated content, why not accomplish that on a more public-facing platform like TikTok, with opportunities for viral success and brand collaborations? Plus, when BeReal loses its ‘authenticity’ USP, the app’s lack of unique features comes more starkly into focus. The twin camera, as an illustration, a well-liked innovation within the app’s infancy, has since been adopted by other platforms like Instagram.

All this begs the broader query of what authenticity even means anymore. It doesn’t take a genius to identify the irony in an organisation instructing us to “be real” and yet expecting us to perform that realness online. Also, as Dr Dyer explains, by calling for users to post immediately after seeing the notification, actively discouraging any preparatory enhancing of appearances, BeReal plays into “negative narratives and tropes” that dictate that we’re only truly ourselves without makeup and filters. But this narrow definition of authenticity is “not that healthy or useful” and has palpable undertones of the rampant “wellness toxicity” we see played out across web and celebrity culture. Young persons are becoming less concerned about the concept of “authenticity” as a metric for appearance presentation, Dr Dyer explains, and more as a metric for the honesty and consistency of one another’s “values”, as quite a few celebrity cancellations – like Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi faux-pas – attest.

Still, there are plenty who haven’t given up on BeReal. Jasmine Denike, 30, still uses it “on a near-daily basis” and finds it “a simple and fun way” to examine in on friends “without the pressure to make the images look perfect.” A spokesperson from BeReal added that the app still “has over 25 million day by day lively users around the globe”, up from 20 million earlier within the yr (in addition they stressed that “the estimates provided in third party reports aren’t accurate”, although they didn’t refute the general trend suggested by these reports or provide specific statistical corrections).

Perhaps BeReal was doomed to affix the ever-expanding graveyard of honourably-intentioned apps. In attempting to pioneer recent ways of engaging with social media, these ventures routinely risk triggering our fundamental dislike for being told what to do, and sometimes metamorphose over time into the very things they once promised to face against. In BeReal’s case, prescriptive messaging drove users to thwart its authenticity ethos altogether. The app has advanced us forwards though – just not in the way in which it meant to. It has proven just how slippery the often-invoked concept of authenticity really is, and reminded us that there’s multiple option to authentically express our identities – each online and offline.