Technology writers are sadly (some gleefully) announcing the latest admission to the social media morgue: the formerly ascendant photo-sharing app BeReal.
The app had been a huge success, jumping from 1m to 20m users in just seven months. Central to its success was its positioning as the anti-Instagram, a platform trading on authenticity that offered a glimpse of our friends’ “real” (read: mundane) lives. But its active daily users more than halved between October 2022 and March 2023, down from 20m to 6m. Its expected demise not only forces us to ask how “authentic” a photo-sharing app can ever be, but whether we actually want the authenticity it sells.
