Instagram turns into BeReal with its new “Candid” feature

We already know that Instagram’s become just a merge of many other apps, but at this point, it’s getting ridiculous. Its latest feature is called “Candid,” and it lets you capture and share what you’re doing right now, with both the front and the back camera taking the photo. Sounds familiar? Yup, it’s the same as BeReal, which is, ironically, marketed as “anti-Instagram.”

I noticed the unusual new(ish) format yesterday on Gleb Feels’s Instagram (by the way, his videos are my happy place). Even though it was new to Instagram, it looked wildly familiar. I had BeReal for a while until I bored even myself with my boring life. So, seeing a photo with another tiny image in the top left reminded me a lot of the “anti-Instagram” social media app.

On Instagram, it’s called Candid Stories. It merges a feature originally seen on BeReal with Stories, the feature Instagram picked up from Snapchat. “Candid” lets you take a photo with your front and the main camera simultaneously and post it to Stories. It’s only visible to those who also share their own candid moments, and it’s now on both Facebook and Instagram.

There are a few ways to capture a Candid: from the stories camera, the multi-author story at the top of your feed, or from the daily notification reminder that starts after your first candid. Thankfully, if you don’t want to receive the daily notification reminder, you can turn it off in your Settings.

Instagram writes that it’s testing the feature for now, so not all users have it, and it may be removed after a while. But considering the growing popularity of BeReal, I believe that Instagram will keep this “candid” format. After all, it’s not even the first time they used the same format. You could have seen it in the “Dual Camera” introduced earlier this year.

I love Instagram for the educational and fun content shared by the people I follow. I even met some of them in person, and we became friends over time. But as a social network, it’s completely losing its point. It’s no longer a photo-sharing app, it’s not even just “Tinstatok” anymore. It’s a chaotic, confusing mashup of TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, even Myspace, and a bunch of advertisements, with just a hint of meaningful images or videos from people I actually follow. Some friends of mine say all of this is causing them anxiety, and the platform is becoming more and more difficult to navigate. Not to mention that it’s impossible to please the algorithm gods. So if this “evolution” of Instagram continues, I believe my generation will migrate somewhere else, just like we’re doing with Facebook.