It's called Gas and it's a very special social network: it's based on simple surveys like: "Who dresses better?" or "Who is the best DJ?". The chosen person receives an anonymous message with their compliment, according to the name of the app that comes from giving gas, that is, in digital jargon, encourage, motivate: a kind of antidote against cyberbullying.
The app, available only in the US, is very simple and open to anyone, although it is mainly aimed at students. After registering, the contacts are added and the mobile geolocates the nearby schools; Once your institute has been identified, the user can begin to exchange content whose objective is to increase the self-esteem of others. Not surprisingly, the Gas team defines its application as "the only healthy place left on the internet".
The founder of the startup is Nikita Bier, already the creator of the To Be Honest platform, acquired and then closed by Facebook between 2017 and 2018. Gas was born in August 2022 and in October it already had one million active users and 30,000 new subscribers. per hour; for The Wall Street Journal it is "the hottest application of the moment", where "young people exchange friendly comments". According to Sensor Tower, Gas has reached 7.4 million downloads and almost seven million dollars billed thanks to the payment function called God Mode, which offers hints to discover who the compliments are coming from.
At the end of 2022, after discovering the success of Gas, two young engineers from Murcia, Alex Culebras and Pablo Sánchez Chisvert, decided to replicate the same model with FAN! "In the first month of life we already have 15,000 users and we are doubling the numbers weekly," say its creators. The application is already present in more than 200 schools in Spain and close to 40,000 compliments have been sent, without having yet gone through rounds of financing and with a very limited investment in marketing.
For its part, Gas was acquired a few weeks ago by Discord, the content platform used by more than 150 million people a month. "We work to create an inclusive world where no one feels like a stranger and we are delighted to welcome Gas," read the company's blog without disclosing the financial terms of the operation.
Founded in 2015 by Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, Discord has garnered much praise over the years for allowing like-minded users to communicate more effectively, while also providing a greater sense of privacy. At the same time, the platform has drawn widespread criticism for failing to moderate content, as evidenced by the recent release of classified US government documents. In addition, Discord is the most used tool for organizing extremist rallies and transmitting racist messages, so the acquisition of Gas also serves to improve its image.
The success of applications like Gas or FAN! confirms certain trends that have been observed for some years in the universe of social networks; on the one hand, a greater desire for reality compared to platforms like Instagram, famous for its filters and the seemingly perfect lives of influencers; on the other, which recently led Marck Zuckerberg to affirm that “the future is private”.
BeReal, a social network created at the end of 2020 by the French Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, is precisely a reflection of the first trend. His goal is to create a space where people feel free to show what their lives are really like. Once a day, at different times, users receive a notification asking them to simultaneously take two photos, a selfie and a frontal one, and post them within two minutes without retouching.
Hailed as the anti-instagram, BeReal is quickly winning over Gen Z with its promise of authenticity. In fact, the application has exceeded 53 million downloads worldwide and, in an age dominated by narcissism, its willingness to eliminate two of the elements that most favor this drift is surprising: filters and likes. That said, a PhotoAid survey shows that 68% of a sample of a thousand BeReal users have ever suffered anguish thinking that others live more interesting moments. Reality doesn't like everyone.
In any case, just as for Gas, in the case of BeReal it is still too early to know if it will be able to find a niche outside of the university bubbles: from Peach to Clubhouse, there are many promising applications that have disappeared quickly. However, it is clear that these experiments reflect the fatigue that many people feel with the transformation of platforms like Instagram, which was born as a space to share photos with friends, and has become a kind of huge digital shopping mall, where it is difficult to distinguish sponsored content from authentic posts.
This increasingly widespread feeling of rejection leads to a return to the private of which Zuckerberg spoke and to a phenomenon that former Meta executive Sarah Wilson, writing in the Harvard Business Review, called "digital bonfires." He said: "While social media can seem like a crowded airport terminal, where anyone can walk in but no one seems to be at ease, digital firesides offer a more intimate oasis where smaller groups of people are happy to come together around shared interests." , leaving traditional platforms to public figures who really need to reach as many people as possible.
The landing of this migration are WhatsApp groups, but also Telegram or Discord itself, virtual places where opinions, experiences and material of all kinds can be shared in small circles, which allows participants to behave more spontaneously. A trend already widely practiced by celebrities, who, to escape the need to project an idealized image, have spent years creating secondary profiles open only to close friends: the so-called finstas.
The fact is that the number of users of Facebook for a year has stopped growing, Twitter has to deal with the chaos of Elon Musk and even Instagram is suffering some unexpected difficulties: digital bonfires seem destined to consolidate, while TikTok recreates a kind of television that has almost no social network. After years spent building a virtual persona to amass a following, priorities, especially among the younger generation, seem to be shifting in favor of more privacy, security, and education. If it were confirmed, it might not be so bad.
