In 2022, a French app called BeReal sent its users a notification at a random time each day: you have two minutes to post. No filters. No editing. Front camera and back camera at the same time, showing whatever you were actually doing. A generation raised on highly curated Instagram feeds found themselves posting lunch at a desk, a face half-awake at 7am, or a cat sitting on a keyboard. The authenticity was jarring, then charming, then massive. BeReal hit 73 million daily active users in 2023.
Then Instagram copied it. Now BeReal is fading. Instagram is fine. And the whole arc tells you something important about how social platforms actually work, which has nothing to do with which app has the best feature set.
What BeReal Got Right (And Why It Worked at All)
BeReal launched in 2020 but took off in 2022, mainly on college campuses. The timing mattered. Instagram had spent years optimizing for engagement, which meant algorithmically surfacing highly produced content: filtered photos, polished reels, aspirational aesthetics. The result was that Instagram became exhausting to participate in. Posting anything required thought about lighting, caption, timing, and presentation.
BeReal eliminated all of that. Two minutes, no filter, real time, no likes (initially). The dopamine loop was different: not vanity metrics, but the feeling of actually seeing what your friends were doing. The notification itself was social glue. Everyone who got the notification at the same time was implicitly sharing a moment, even if they were in different cities. It felt human in a way that Instagram had stopped feeling human.
The authenticity pitch worked precisely because Instagram had gone so far in the other direction. BeReal was not trying to replace Instagram. It was filling a space Instagram had abandoned.
Instagram’s Response: Clone and Conquer
Instagram launched Candid Challenges in 2022, a feature that was openly a BeReal clone: random daily prompts, dual camera, two-minute window. It did not take off immediately, but it did something more strategically important. It removed the exclusive novelty of BeReal’s core mechanic.
The deeper issue for BeReal was always network effects. Social apps live or die by who is already on them. Instagram had everyone’s friends, their favorite creators, their family. BeReal had their college friends and maybe a sibling. When the novelty faded, when the random notification started feeling like another obligation rather than a fun interruption, the utility calculation shifted back toward Instagram.
By 2024, BeReal’s daily active users had dropped significantly, and the company was exploring a sale. Meta, predictably, was not the buyer. BeReal was acquired by Voodoo, a French mobile game company, in mid-2024 for 500 million euros. The nostalgia internet had already moved on to different experiments.
What This Pattern Tells Us About Platforms
BeReal is not a unique story. Snapchat pioneered ephemeral stories. Instagram added Stories in 2016 and Snapchat’s growth stalled. TikTok’s short vertical video format was copied by Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and even Twitter before it became X. Clubhouse launched audio rooms in 2020, had a massive cultural moment, and was largely killed when Spaces (Twitter) and the Twitter Spaces/LinkedIn Audio copycat wave arrived.
The pattern is consistent: a smaller platform finds a format that resonates, gets cultural traction, and is then cloned by platforms with larger networks. The smaller platform either gets acquired or declines. The format survives but is absorbed into the dominant ecosystem.
This is not just about corporate strategy. It reflects something real about why people use social media. The features matter less than the network. You can have the best photo filters ever made, but if none of your friends are on the app, the filters are irrelevant. Instagram understood this early, which is why its copies were good enough rather than better. Good enough, with everyone you know already on it, beats better, alone.
The Creator Economy Complicates Everything
There is a wrinkle in the “network wins” narrative: professional creators. BeReal was hostile to the creator economy by design. No filters, no editing, no algorithmic amplification of content, no brand deals. This made it authentic, but it also meant there was no financial incentive for creators to invest in the platform. On Instagram, creators are, in a real sense, the product. They attract audiences, advertisers pay for access to those audiences, and the platform takes a cut.
BeReal never had this layer. Which meant the content that appeared on it was genuinely amateur in the original sense of the word: people doing it for love, not money. That was a feature for users who were tired of professional-grade Instagram feeds. It was a dealbreaker for the creator economy, which increasingly drives what platforms people actually spend time on.
The tension is real and worth noting. The algorithm that keeps users engaged tends to surface professional content at the expense of amateur content. Amateur content is more authentic. Professional content is more engaging. Social platforms have consistently chosen engagement, which means they have consistently chosen professionalism, which means authenticity as a platform feature is always fighting uphill.
What Comes After Authenticity
BeReal’s decline does not mean authenticity was a fad. The appetite it identified was real and remains real. Gen Z in particular shows a consistent preference for rawer content, BTS footage, lo-fi aesthetics, phone quality video. The TikTok ecosystem is full of this. The difference is that TikTok delivers it through an algorithm that is also very good at making you watch for three more hours, which somewhat undercuts the authenticity angle.
The platforms experimenting with “anti-algorithm” design are worth watching: apps that show posts in chronological order, communities that resist growth, platforms that deliberately limit reach. The early web had this quality by default, not by design, and people are increasingly trying to recreate it deliberately. Whether any of them can build a sustainable business while doing it is the open question.
BeReal tried. The features were honest. The business model was not really there. And when Instagram came for the mechanic, there was not enough left to fight with. That is a lesson platforms are going to keep learning in slightly different variations for a long time.
Sources: BeReal investor reports (2023-2024), Voodoo acquisition announcement (June 2024), Instagram Candid Challenges launch press coverage (2022), Axios social media usage data (Q1 2024).
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