Instagram and Snapchat seem to have been around forever. I remember watching my older sister in awe as she downloaded Snapchat on her IPhone five. Instagram, being released around a year earlier than Snapchat in 2010, is still going strong after more than a decade. 

According to Mayo Clinic, over 97 percent of teenagers have used some form of social media before they turn 17. As of December 2021, Instagram has over 1393 million users. BeReal, the newest social media platform, has blown up this past summer with 21.6 million users as of August 2022. 

A notification pops up at a random time of each day to tell users it is time to take a front camera photo and back camera photo to upload and post. The goal is to be on time when uploading the picture for others to see and react to using more pictures of oneself. If late, the app displays the time the user actually posted compared to the time the two minute window notification went off. You can caption your upload and comment or react to others, but there are no likes or follower counts.

The description BeReal gave itself on the app store is “not another social network” but the lack there-of could just so happen to be the app’s flaw. 

After I see everyones posts, I rarely ever go back onto the app later on in the day. During the summer, I only ever saw a late post when the notification came at 8am when few people were up. Summertime was the peak of BeReal because fun things were always going on. Posting when it is 85 degrees outside and on the river or with friends has more interaction than sitting in fluorescent school lighting doing significant figures. 

Teenagers are in school a high percentage of the time when BeReal gives its silly little notification, which just leads to boring pictures of classrooms and hallways. Or, if the user decides to be several hours late instead of posting on time it ends up defeating the whole purpose of “being real.” Sometimes the BeReal has lucky timing and goes off during a football game. When that happens, you can guarantee to have your entire feed to be extremely similar pictures all posing in the student section. 

Apps like BeReal have good intentions, but whenever a social media platform is made in attempts to not be social media, it never lasts.