Another One

Another app just landed to kill Instagram and Facebook and everything in between. Vero. The pitch: you share what matters to you—music, films, restaurants, photos, whatever—and you choose exactly who sees it. No algorithm, no ads, no surveillance. Just people you actually know seeing things you actually want them to see.

It’s the same pitch Snapchat made, then Peach, then Vine, then about fifty others. The format changes but the dream stays the same: social without the extraction, without the madness. And technically, yeah, that should be better. Sending a song or a photo to a few people shouldn’t require a platform that’s turned into a surveillance shop designed to keep you staring until your attention is worth money.

What’s different right now is that some real people are already on it—Charli XCX, Max Joseph, Zack Snyder. Not massive names but actual artists with fanbases. They’re doing the thing where they post exclusive stuff and make it feel like being there early means something. It’s basically a timer. Once you see that pattern start, you’re watching an app in its window. Six months, maybe a year if it’s lucky. Then it dies and people pretend they never heard of it.

I understand the appeal of trying. Every time something like this lands you think maybe this is the one that sticks, that finally lets you just share something with your friends without a machine deciding it’s not profitable enough to show them. That thinking is sound. The app that delivers on it probably isn’t coming from somewhere. It’s not going to have venture capital and celebrity seed users. And if it does, it’s already poisoned.

So another one lands, another one dies, and we’ll do this again next year. You know it won’t fix anything, but you download anyway.