"It's totally pointless, but it's fun”: How BeReal Fits into Young Adults’ Social Media Ecosystem and Friendships.

Paper Title

“It's totally pointless, but it's fun”: How BeReal Fits into Young Adults’ Social Media Ecosystem and Friendships

Publication Info

• Topic area: Social media use and its role in relationship maintenance among young adults.
• Keywords: BeReal, social media ecosystem, relationship maintenance, ephemerality, informality, improvisation, young adults, user effort, HCI, social media design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research has focused on social media platforms as singular entities, often neglecting their role within a broader ecosystem. While BeReal claims to foster meaningful connections, little is known about how its unique features—ephemerality, informality, and improvisation—affect relationship maintenance.
• Significance: Understanding how BeReal fits into young adults' social media use can reveal insights into designing platforms that better support relationship maintenance, especially in a competitive and engagement-driven ecosystem.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have documented how young adults use social media to maintain relationships, but these platforms often introduce relational tensions. BeReal builds on trends like ephemerality and informality but adds improvisation, which some users find stressful. This study seeks to address gaps in understanding how BeReal's distinct features influence friendships and its place in the social media ecosystem.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study investigates BeReal's role in young adults' friendships and social media habits through interviews with 31 university students, introducing the Social Media Effort (SME) heuristic to conceptualize how audience size and content volume affect user effort.
• Novelty:
  1. Analysis of BeReal as part of a broader social media ecosystem rather than a standalone platform.
  2. Introduction of the SME heuristic to visualize the relationship between audience size, content volume, and user effort.
  3. Insights into how BeReal's minimalistic design supports relationship maintenance but faces challenges in a profit-driven ecosystem.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with young adults at a northeastern U.S. university.
  • Used qualitative coding techniques (structural, descriptive, and pattern coding) to analyze interview data.
  • Compared BeReal with Instagram and Snapchat to understand its niche in the social media ecosystem.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • BeReal is perceived as a low-effort, fun platform for sharing casual, everyday moments with smaller networks of friends (5–75 connections).
  • It helps maintain relationships with distant or past friends but does not significantly deepen bonds with close-proximity friends.
  • Users value its minimalistic design but doubt its long-term viability due to business model constraints.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Compared to Instagram and Snapchat, BeReal is seen as more candid, less effort-intensive, and focused on smaller, closer networks.
  • Its lack of infinite scrolling and advertising creates a lightweight user experience.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants were recruited via campus fliers, and interviews lasted 30–90 minutes.
  • Data was analyzed using qualitative coding in Dedoose and visualized in Miro boards.
  • Findings were contextualized within prior research on social media ecosystems and relationship maintenance.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study is limited to a single university and a specific demographic (young adults in the U.S.).
  • Future work should explore BeReal's role across diverse populations and examine alternative business models for low-effort platforms.

Summary

This study examines how BeReal fits into young adults' social media ecosystems and friendships, finding that it serves as a low-effort platform for sharing casual, everyday moments with smaller networks of friends. While it helps maintain relationships with distant or past friends, it does not significantly deepen bonds with close-proximity friends. The study introduces the Social Media Effort (SME) heuristic, which highlights how audience size and content volume influence user effort. The findings suggest that BeReal's minimalistic design fills a niche in the social media ecosystem, but its long-term viability is uncertain due to the pressures of engagement-driven business models. The authors advocate for the development of nonprofit or alternative platforms to better support relationship maintenance.