A social network to share photos at the time of capture and see what close friends are doing. No video, music or sales. That was Instagram at the beginning of the last decade when it launched, but it could be the description of its newly created competitor, BeReal.
Since July 14, the social network is at least in second place among the best-rated apps on the App Store in the United States, according to monitoring by Sensor Tower. In Brazil, searches for the app on Google exploded in the last week of April and have remained high ever since.
More than 1 million people downloaded the app from the PlayStore, a niche tool compared to WhatsApp, for example, which accumulates 5 billion downloads. But the recent interest coincides with a wave of complaints against Instagram, which is on more than 1 billion phones.
Lawyer Fabio Barros, 30, is one of those who echo the criticism. “Instagram seems intent on further worsening the quality of everyone’s virtual life,” he says, referring to what he considers a visual pollution of the platform. “People are already bombarded with information from all sides. It doesn’t help when they try to increase it.”
At BeReal, where he has been for a week, Barros found the simplicity that existed at the beginning of Instagram.
There he can only post once a day, at the time the application defines. After receiving the notification, he has two minutes to take the photo and post it — the only way to see what his friends have posted too.
“There’s no time for anyone to get ready. When it’s working hours, I see everyone at their desk, fiddling with their computer,” he says. The user can only access the camera through the application itself, which has no filter. These are features that prevent the usual overproductions for photos and videos of the competitor.
Since the rise of TikTok, the video editing social network made famous by viral dances, Instagram has started to launch tools that mimic the Chinese platform. This is where the reels are born, for video montage, and the full-screen test in content recommendations, features similar to those of TikTok.
It was the same strategy applied with Snapchat. As reported at the time by the Wall Street Journal, in 2013, the photo and video sharing platform that disappears in 24 hours rejected an offer from the company that owns Instagram — and saw its main tool become stories.
The latest changes, however, generated protests on the networks.
“Make Instagram be Instagram again”, published last Monday (25) the American influencer Kylie Jenner, the second most followed person on the network in the world. “Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see pretty pictures of my friends.”
The researcher at the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio, Victor Barcellos, locates this clash in the field of the economy of attention.
“These big platforms are chasing users’ attention, which has become one of the main assets in the digital economy,” he says. The longer a person stays on the network, the more ads they are exposed to.
According to a January 2021 report by App Annie, in the United States, users spend more time on TikTok than on Facebook. In 2020, there were 21.5 hours per user per month spent on the Chinese app, compared to 17.7 hours on the American social network.
The recipe for success can be found in the “For You” tab of the application, according to Barcellos. There are recommendations from accounts you don’t necessarily follow, selected by artificial intelligence.
“The algorithm has such a clear precision in identifying preferences that makes us really get addicted to the screen and spend hours and hours watching that content”, says the researcher.
Chef and influencer Guilherme Poulain, 36, feels this in his publications. With 87,000 followers on Instagram, his videos can reach 20,000 people, according to him. On TikTok, where he has nearly 1,000 followers, his posts sometimes top 10,000.
“It’s impressive. You don’t have to have a lot of followers there for the video you posted to be super viewed,” he says.
Instagram’s attempt to follow in the same direction has become one of the biggest complaints from users, who ask to see less ads and videos from strangers and more posts from friends.
“These complaints happen due to the loss of autonomy of users in deciding which content will appear for them”, says researcher Victor Barcellos.
As the algorithm is not open, it is impossible to know the exact changes that the social network promotes. Barcellos compares with a car. Only those who assembled it know which parts are there, but driving it is possible to know if the engine is more powerful or if the wheels are more stable.
Speeches by the leaders point to a shift in the business model.
In July of last year, Adam Mosseri, the executive who runs Instagram, said that the social network was no longer “a photo-sharing app”. “Video is driving huge growth online for all platforms right now, and I think that’s an area where we need to put more effort.”
Public pressure made Instagram back off last Thursday (28). Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, announced that it is temporarily decreasing the number of recommendations from strangers in Feed and pausing the full-screen test worldwide.
“We understand that changes to the app require adaptation, and while we believe that Instagram needs to evolve as the world changes as well, we want to take the time to ensure this is done in the best possible way,” a spokesperson said in a statement. Meta’s voice.
The decline came in the same week that the company recorded its first quarterly drop in revenue.
Among the announcements of the last few days is the “dual camera” feature, which allows you to shoot with the front and rear cameras simultaneously, a tool that already exists in BeReal.
For Poulain, the attempt should not be enough to return to using the network for personal matters.
“I’m lazy about Instagram. I’ve been using it less and less. I use it a lot to respond to people and for my work, but to look at feed and stories I use less and less”, he says. “What they’re asking is what BeReal has been to me. I have few people there and I’m seeing ordinary moments in their lives.”
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