BeReal replaces its Discovery feed with a Friends of Friends feed, adds pinning up to three profile posts and mentions, and says the app is holding at ~20M DAUs
BeReal is trying to be real. And if we're being real, what's the point of that Discovery feed, anyway?
Context & Ripple Effects
BeReal’s product changes follow a period in which retention was under scrutiny: third-party estimates cited daily use falling sharply in early 2023, while the company now reports roughly 20 million daily active users. The shift away from a broad Discovery feed narrows distribution back toward social-graph connections.
The company had already tested outward-facing content with the RealPeople curated timeline. Related coverage later shows it also moved toward opening the app to brands and celebrities, making this feed redesign an important marker in how BeReal balances intimate sharing with broader reach.
First-order effects
- Discovery is replaced by Friends of Friends, so users’ default avenue for finding new content becomes mediated by existing social connections rather than a standalone exploration feed.
- Pinning up to three profile posts and adding mentions give users more durable profile context and more explicit ways to direct attention to other people.
Second-order effects
- A graph-based discovery surface can make a user’s existing network more important to reach, while reducing the role of broadly curated or viral distribution that the earlier Discovery feed enabled.
- The change puts BeReal’s earlier RealPeople experiment in sharper contrast: product teams must decide whether new-content discovery belongs in curated programming, social referrals, or both.
Third-order effects
- If this approach persists, BeReal may evolve from a single daily-post novelty into a social graph with lightweight identity and discovery tools—without necessarily adopting a conventional algorithmic feed.
- The later move toward brands and celebrities joining the service suggests that the longer-term challenge is preserving a friends-first experience while introducing audiences that seek broader distribution and monetization.
The trend: BeReal is part of a broader social-app push to add retention and discovery mechanics while trying to retain a differentiated, more personal sharing model.