Cliff Obrecht, the billionaire co-founder of graphic design software company Canva, doesn’t use social media.
“I deleted everything that scrolls from my phone because I believe it all just rots your brain and it’s just distraction from what’s truly important in life, and I really don’t care to listen to everyone’s opinions every day,” he said this month.
When even the founder of a software business that has become the country’s biggest private technology start-up - in part on the back of social media - is turning away from the medium, you know it has a serious problem. (Canva is often used to create the kind of stylish text and image tiles that fill Instagram feeds.)
This year, a new platform that aims to address some of the biggest criticisms of Instagram has emerged and experienced explosive growth.
Canva’s Cliff Obrecht has deleted ‘everything that scrolls’ from his phone.
BeReal encourages people to post daily at the same time, which is randomly determined, using their phone’s front and rear cameras. The resulting photos of people at work, or in university lectures or in their PJs have been described, in one of the buzzwords of the moment, as authentic, unlike the often carefully curated images on the likes of Instagram.
The atmosphere around BeReal is a little like Facebook a decade ago, where people looked at the default “what’s on your mind?” prompt to post on their wall and, because social media was new and we were wonderfully naive, simply answered. In public.
“It’s really true, I love drama so much,” one friend posted on Facebook in 2010. And then a bit later: “f--kkk”. The context of these posts has been lost to time, as has that kind of candour. It just doesn’t exist on Facebook any more, let alone Instagram.
BeReal, on the other hand, is experiencing a moment. One analysis firm, Apptopia, has charts of its users curving upwards like a hockey stick. Industry sites report it counting 8 million users a day. But it remains to be seen whether it has a chance to become a true force on the internet or if its current popularity is merely a flash in the pan.
Not that long ago, Facebook’s dominance seemed unassailable. And then TikTok emerged, seemingly from nowhere, to dent its growth and steal away the attention of some of its most important users - people under the age of 24 .