There was a time when social media were simple without gimmicks. Plain and useful, no distraction and purposely built with communication in mind.
As social media became the most popular way for people to communicate, things changed. There are a lot of money involved, and they indeed want to make even more money. This is when they started adding features and tweaking things in hopes for better business results.
While some have been shown to be great, most just took away the purpose of communication: making social media a place for loneliness, where people are competing to get more likes and comments.
Facebook, Instagram Twitter, Snapchat and some others, have conquered the social media market for quite a long time, with practically nothing can dethrone any of them soon. But there is one app that caught attention due to its sudden surge of popularity.
it's called 'Vero', and it's a social network "that lets you be yourself."
Vero has been around since 2015, so no, it's nothing new.
But the thing about the Vero is that the app is an ad-free social media that allows users to share things, like photos, add links, and recommend books, movies and TV shows to friends. Simple as that.
This is where some people started questioning themselves about whether the app's claim is too good to be true.
Becoming popular, the app's rank skyrocketed in apps' stores list, suggesting that social media users may be looking for alternatives to the already established but mainstream social media platforms. Even advertisers have started advertising their products on Vero.
This dramatic increase in usage resulted in the app in crashing repeatedly. Some users have even said that they couldn't search for new users without encountering a server error.
Due to very large traffic, we're experiencing intermittent technical issues.
We're working to resolve them as soon as possible.— Vero (@verotruesocial) February 24, 2018
We continue to make progress towards solving the issues we've been having.
We want to thank all who have sent us messages of encouragement.
Thank you again for your patience.— Vero (@verotruesocial) February 25, 2018
We apologize for the late update.
We are scaling our servers to meet the increasing demand.
We appreciate your continued patience while we work to restore service.— Vero (@verotruesocial) February 26, 2018
Vero shares a lot of similarities with Instagram. The notable difference is that Vero arranges its news feed in a chronological manner, rather than using algorithms. So here, users can see every posts from the people they follow, not just posts that have more likes, comments and shares - something that algorithms think is right.
While the app has proven itself to be popular among those that want to experience an alternative choice, It has some problems.
For example, the app's design is less intuitive and appealing, making it somehow repelling to some avid social media users. Its user experience is also far from its competitors. And since it has a different learning curve, new users can find it a bit confusing to use.
What's more, since Vero does not display any ads, it needs to make money elsewhere. The app is meant to be free for the first million users, so anyone who signs up after that milestone will have to pay for subscription.
But considering that the app is like a small fish in a pond, occupied by bigger and more powerful fish that may eat or kill it, Vero may change its mind due to its popularity. Not to mention that Vero was created by Ayman Hariri, a billionaire businessman who is also the son of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
His idea in creating Vero, was because the frustration of seeing too many ads on social media networks.
Although some people said that they are joining the app just to claim their names, rather than having any fondness to the app itself, the main challenge for Vero in the time being, is to maintain its surge of popularity.