Comment by kotlip

Many of the negative effects of social media and phone use seem to point to infinite feeds of content as the root cause. I spent my teens scrolling a Facebook feed that largely consisted of updates from my friends (with a few meme pages sprinkled in between). Most of my time was spent reacting to posts and engaging in lively discussions in long comment threads instead of passively viewing content, and the feed didn't randomly reshuffle itself the way it does now so you'd naturally stop scrolling once you'd caught up with the day's updates. I actually felt closer to my friends as a result. Using BeReal feels like using Facebook in its earlier days because it has a finite feed, and it seems to be the only social media app that encourages you to engage with people instead of content.