- Studio Dirt
- Posts
- BeRelevant
BeRelevant
When novelty fades.
Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on BeReal’s last-ditch effort at staying relevant. Daisy Alioto shares some thoughts on Bluesky.
BeRelevant
Last month, I wrote about how I sensed there was a new kind of social app emerging. These are platforms with a guiding ethos that is “more social than media” by mediating IRL meet-ups and interactions for an online base of users. The anti-Instagram shtick that propelled apps like BeReal and Dispo to Covid-era popularity no longer seemed interesting or viable. People have limited attention spans, and novelty as a use-case can only take an app so far.
Case in point: BeReal’s swift decline towards irrelevance, as users find less and less of a reason to snap a surprise photo of themselves once a day. In April, the NYT reported that monthly app downloads have dropped since September, and the number of daily active users is down 61 percent from its peak, from about 15 million in October 2022 to less than six million in March 2023. (BeReal later disputed this data in a company blog post that said it had 20 million daily active users.)
But BeReal’s preemptive obituary in the paper of record seems to have struck a nerve or, at the very least, was enough of a reality check for the team to spring into action. Over the past few weeks, the company has announced a slate of back-to-back updates in, what I assume to be, a last-ditch effort to win back users: First, a Spotify integration, which allowed users to share what they’re listening to in real time. Next came the bonus posts, which encouraged users to post up to two additional BeReals, provided they were on time with their daily BeReal. On May 1, BeReal launched RealPeople in the UK, a “curated timeline of the world’s most interesting people.”
The torrent of new features took me by surprise. It reeked of desperation—an admittedly uncharacteristic move for a French executive team that has been famously clandestine to the press. (Last July, I was invited to speak with the founding team in an off-the-record meeting in NYC, an opportunity afforded to several tech and digital culture journalists. I don’t remember much, except that the founder’s affect was very oui, oui French and that he was convinced BeReal could be more than a Gen Z gimmick: It could be a way for grandparents to stay in touch with their kids.)
Anyway, the updates are coming too late. The BeReal team has missed its moment, writes Platformer’s Casey Newton. They “failed to ship more than a couple of user-facing features over the past nine months: a private archive of your past posts, and the ability to add what song you were playing to your posts.” When the app first launched, I wrote that its usage was heavily dependent on individual friend circles: “Once people start to tire of it, chances are, their friends will too. There’s a FOMO-ish undercurrent to the hype. People download BeReal because they’re curious. They don’t want to miss out.” What is there to miss now?
Get Low
The total number of users on Twitter alternative Bluesky is approaching the enrollment of Ohio State’s Columbus campus. And yes, it smells crazy in there. The app popped seemingly overnight with an influx of power posters like the woman that made chili for her neighbors, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Miles Klee. Users who brute-forced the nomenclature of “posts” as “skeets” were overjoyed when Tapper said “skeet” on-air.
There is a map of the various clusters of the app floating around:
I haven’t been invited to the Brazilian Taylor Swift Cult yet, but hope springs eternal. Looking at the above, it’s immediately apparent why chaos has reigned on the app. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber explained, “It’s important for y’all to realize that this app is wild right now because all of you are posters. You’re probably not meant to meet each other in the wild without a cushioning biome of lurkers around.” Given my deep appreciation of architecture, I prefer to refer to them as “load-bearing normies.”
The experience of the app has already sped through several micro eras: a long thread that you couldn’t leave if you replied to it (“hellthread”), posting nudes, and the censorship of nudes which led to pornography of the character ALF from the 1980’s TV series ALF. This era is ongoing. As a noted hunter-gatherer, I was able to secure an invite code for Dirt (@dirt.bsky.social) but if you’re feeling SKOMO just be grateful you’re not being skatioed like Miles Klee for suggesting they should let more Australians in. — Daisy Alioto
MIXTAPE
Good links from the Dirtyverse.
Dirt is in solidarity with the WGA writers on strike ✊Vulture has a handy explainer on the WGA’s demands and the situation at the picket lines.
This 2013 Gawker 1.0 essay on smarm just turned 10… and is still relevant. (h/t Willy Blackmore)
How TikTok Shop is taking off in Indonesia. (Rest of World)
W. David Marx on the hyperpop duo 100 gecs and how their so-called “weirdness” is reflection of 2023 culture: “[100 gecs] mix and match a ludicrous set of Top 40 conventions from the last two decades, which are immediately comprehensible and pleasurable … If this is the weirdest possible music that we’ll have a communal moment around, do more oblique forms of obscurity have a place in our culture at all?”
I loved this opening paragraph of Amanda Petrusich’s profile of The National:
“For more than two decades, this has been the National’s grist: not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human … Part of it is surely existential—our lives are temporary and inscrutable; death is compulsory and forever—but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses.”
🌱 JOIN THE DIRTYVERSE
Join our Discord and talk Dirt-y with us. It’s free to join! Paid subscribers have access to all channels.
Follow @dirtyverse on Twitter for the latest news and Spotify for monthly curated playlists.
Shop for some in-demand Dirt merch. 🍄