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

The social media app BeReal positions itself as a space for meaningful connections, however, little is known about how the app's unique combination of ephemerality, informality, and improvisation actually supports relationship maintenance. We aimed to understand what role BeReal plays in young adults’ friendships and lives. Drawing on interviews with 31 young adults at a large university in the northeastern U.S., we find that users treated BeReal as a fun, low-effort space to share glimpses of everyday life with smaller networks of friends. BeReal helped users maintain relationships, especially with past or geographically distant friends but not necessarily deepen bonds with close friends. Users welcomed the app's minimalistic user experience but raised doubts about the platform's longevity. Based on our findings, we present the Social Media Effort (SME) heuristic to help designers and researchers visualize how content and audience shape the social media ecosystem. We advocate that the HCI community design new platforms, since dominant business models are not poised to support relationship maintenance.