BeReal’s new ‘RealPeople’ timeline will feature photos snapped by artists, athletes, and activists.
BeReal is releasing another feature that seems to counter the purpose of the app: a feed dedicated to famous people. Instead of exchanging daily photos with your friends, now you’ll get to see what the top athletes, artists, and activists of the world are up to.
BeReal, the app that markets itself as “Your friends for real,” gives you different windows of time each day to take a selfie and front-facing photo that gets shared with friends. The whole point of the app is to randomly share what you’re up to with friends, whether you’re doing something as boring as laying in bed or sitting in front of your computer at work.
But now, BeReal is throwing strangers into the mix. Its new feed, called RealPeople, is a “curated timeline of the world’s most interesting people” that features “an ever-changing collection” of high-profile people from around the globe. The whole point of the feature is to show that celebrities are regular humans just like us (yes, really).
“RealPeople isn’t about influencing, amassing likes or comments, or promoting brands,” BeReal writes. “You won’t see photoshopped pictures, product recommendations or ads disguised as posts. It’s trying to show we’re all more alike than we think.”
The app is only testing the feature in the UK for now, which you can access by selecting the Discovery tab and then hitting RealPeople. From here, you can react to posts with a RealMoji as you scroll through the timeline, as well as hide posts and report them. BeReal also notes that you can suggest someone (or yourself) for its RealPeople timeline through this form, although it’s unclear whether BeReal has users lined up for its feed already.
After BeReal soared in popularity last summer, that hype has cooled off quite a bit. As Platformer’s Casey Newton points out, part of the reason for that is that it hasn’t really added any meaningful new features. Last month, the app started allowing users to take more than one photo per day, which, again, goes against what we thought the app was all about.
