Poparazzi photo app blows up by banning selfies

Poparazzi seems to lack any of the hallmarks of anything lasting. There is nothing new to the mode, nothing that cannot be done elsewhere, nothing truly unique or interesting. Restricting what you can do in a social network works with the length of a video, but it doesn’t really work with photos. It’s just another app that will be gone in a few mon... See more

One of the things I find most fascinating about Poparazzi is that it shot itself to the #1 spot in the App Store by building its entire product around one of Instagram’s least important features: tagged photos.

The latest frothy app to receive the “next big thing” treatment is Poparazzi, an app that allegedly is blowing up because it doesn’t let you use the front-facing camera on your phone.

It’s a social network that doesn’t show you follower counts, doesn’t let you edit pictures, it automatically follows everyone in your phone book, and I dunno, it’s an app. Josh Constine wrote about it with his trademark froth, suggesting that “the future of social is multiplayer,” a statement that - and I say this respecting Josh otherwise - means ... See more

Instagram disruptors like BeReal, Poparazzi, Dispo, and Locket have promised a more authentic, less curated reality. But even authenticity, over time, becomes performative; “photo dumps” become carefully-crafted compilations of artsy images that show us in a good light (“Look how this blurry photo implies I’m too busy having fun to take non-blurry ... See more

Users keep telling the app over and over again what they want: To post photos for their friends. And yet for some reason Meta continually takes these learnings and decides that people avoiding Instagram’s front-facing features by increasingly using Direct Messages means they must want to *spins wheel of things Adam Mosseri scribbles into a notepad ... See more