ColdFusion - BeReal Social Just Became the Most Downloaded App

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, welcome to another episode of Coldfusion. In 1990, 3% of Americans said that they had no close friends. In 2021, this number has risen to 15%. Sadly, the trend is in the same direction all across the world. So here's a question. If billions of us around the world are so connected through social media, why are we so lonely? Well, as it turns out, the connections made through social media aren't. aren't as real as we once thought.

Starting point is 00:00:35 What's worse is that some sociologists think that social media has actually created a simulation of reality, a simulation that we mistake for reality itself. This can drive social division and make us miserable. We'll cover all of this later in the episode, but first, we'll talk about a new app called Be Real. Be Real promises to strip away the fakeness and bring back authenticity to social media, and people are responding. By mid-2020, it became the number one downloaded app on the App Store in the United States,

Starting point is 00:01:07 and the most downloaded app in Australia, Germany and many other countries. So what is Be Real? Will it last? And what does it tell us about the direction society might be heading? You are watching Told Fusion TV. When social media first gained popularity in the 2010s, it was and still is a great tool to stay in contact with people all around the world. But since then, we've lost our inner sense. countless scandals and whistleblowers have painted virtually every platform as a detriment to society.

Starting point is 00:01:47 It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in. And it is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on. The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other, right? We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term terms signals, hearts, likes, thumbs up, and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with

Starting point is 00:02:43 truth. And it's not an American problem. This is a global problem. People are now consciously aware of the negative effects and are starting to move away. On the back of this trend, Be Real rose to prominence. It aimed to be the anti-social media, social media. So what is Be Real exactly? Be Real is a French social media app released in 2020. It was developed by Alexis Barriad, a former GoPro employee. The application basically sat around for two years before suddenly exploding in popularity in mid-2020. The basic concept of Be Real is simple.

Starting point is 00:03:20 Once you download the app, you get a notification once a day when it's time to, quote, be real. This means you have two minutes to take a photo of whatever you're doing, no matter how mundane. The app takes a dual photo, so that is, a selfie, and then another photo of what you're doing. There's no option for videos on the service yet. According to the company, quote, push notifications are sent around the world simultaneously at different times each day. It's a secret on how the time is chosen every day. It's not random. The result is a social feed filled with unedited photos of people doing everyday unglamorous things.

Starting point is 00:03:57 Eating food, watching a movie at home, doing homework, riding the bus, just everyday things. There are two main tabs, your friends tab, which is just posed from people on your content. contacts list, or the discovery, where you can follow other people if you wish. The biggest difference and the most standout thing is just how bare bones and basic the app is. Really, it's the opposite of Instagram in every way. It's actually on the verge of being boring. But that's the point.

Starting point is 00:04:28 I guess today in social media, we're so used to shiny bells and dopamine hacks to hold our attention. And when that's all taken away, social media can seem extremely dry. There's no algorithm that shows you what to see. There's no light counters, no filters, no editing, no advertisements, just ordinary pictures of people and comments. There's only one post per day, so there's no cluttering of your feed. It's really just a simple snapshot of what your friends or people around the world are doing

Starting point is 00:04:58 at that particular point in time. Despite looking boring from the outside, the app has seen immense success. This year alone, downloads have grown by at least 315%, at least 6,000. 65% of these lifetime downloads happened in the first quarter of 2022, and interestingly, Gen Z are the majority of the users. In August of 2022, Be Real became the most downloaded app in Germany, and the popularity has grown internationally. Fiji even became the first country with an official account.

Starting point is 00:05:30 The company has now received $600 million in funding, and this is set to grow. As of July 2022, the app has over 20 million estimated global installs, and it has a decent active user base with over 10 million active daily users. But it can't all be sunshine and roses. As interesting as this app is, right now I can see Be Real failing in one of three ways. Number one, people just get bored of it. Number two, Be Real adds more features until it loses its identity and becomes just another social media app.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Or three, Instagram could just steal the feature, which is rumored to already be in the works. And aside from all of this, the kids, the case. company still needs a way to figure out how to generate revenue. There's no ads on the platform at all. But regardless of what happens, the fact that this app has become so popular among younger people is a signal to me. It highlights that there's an appetite and demand for a different type of social media, a social media that is healthier, and just maybe, the online space of the future could be healthier too. I do hope to see this scenario unfold, whether it's from Be Real or another player. I'm sure a lot of you also would be confused and quickly quip, why don't these

Starting point is 00:06:43 kids just go outside and talk to people? But for many people, it's just not so easy. If we can have healthier ways of connecting online, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So, let's look into this a little deeper. What does this explosive growth of this app tell us about society? Whether it's images or information, social media is often over-curated. As time has gone on, this has caused social media to largely force society into a state of hyper-reality. Hyper-reality is a term coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in 1981. A hyper-real scenario features a world where the simulations of reality are indistinguishable from reality itself. The real world and the simulated world no longer have boundaries.

Starting point is 00:07:33 As a consequence, nothing in our culture is true anymore. All that we're left with is a representation or a copy of reality. Some may argue that we're not quite at that point yet, but this theory has lately been applied to social media. It goes something like this. All the pictures that we post, links that we share, messages we type,

Starting point is 00:07:54 and media that we consume online, creates a personalized world that's different from the real world. In our minds, this digital world replaces reality. Give it enough time, and the digital reality becomes more important to us than the real world.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Further to this, the algorithms will dictate exactly how your digital world will look like. As time progresses, all of our digital worlds drift further away from what is truly real. For example, a lot of major controversies on Twitter don't exist in the real world. Another common example is the lives that you see others living on Instagram isn't reality. So what does this all have to do with Be Real? Well, this app might be an interesting way of tackling this hyper-reality while having the convenience of staying digitally connected. Philosophically, I find that very interesting, regardless of if I'm going to personally use this app or not. Speaking of which, I have used

Starting point is 00:08:49 the app for a bit and I don't think it's for me. But upon reading what others are saying, people are really liking it. The main consensus is that the app is actually authentic. People tend to only have their close friends instead of the thousands of Instagram followers that may be strangers to them. They state there's less pressure to look good, and this creates a judgment-free zone and overall it makes the app feel more down to earth and for many social media users I can see how this can be refreshing and as a final side this episode isn't sponsored I haven't been in contact or received anything from Be Real this is just my commentary on society just a bit of a different episode on something that I purely just found interesting so anyways let me know what

Starting point is 00:09:31 you guys thought do you think Be Real will succeed or will it fail and do you think will ever collectively escape hyper-reality? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. So that's about it from me. My name is Dago, and you've been watching Cold Fusion, and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode. Cheers guys. Have a good one.

ColdFusion - BeReal Social Just Became the Most Downloaded App

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