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.

BeReal is the latest social media platform to tout itself as a more authentic space for connection. The app notifies users at a random time each day and gives users two minutes to post an image from their smartphone's front- and back-facing cameras. While prior work has theorized authenticity on social media and studied how various user populations enact authenticity, more research is needed to understand whether and how specific design features afford authenticity. We conducted a walkthrough of the BeReal app and interviewed 31 young adults about their experiences on BeReal. We found that participants approached authenticity in two ways—as extemporaneous interaction and as comprehensive self-presentation—and that BeReal harnesses the affordances of visibility, editability, availability, and persistence in a way that enables the former more than the latter. Based on our findings, we offer four recommendations for designers and researchers who seek to support authenticity online.