Indies

Casey Newton was on the Vergecast in July to talk about how BeReal is taking over. On the podcast he described his “pop-up restaurant theory of social networks”, which he has been talking about since at least 2018:

I have this pop-up restaurant theory of social networks, which is: every restaurant is basically the same, but sometimes a pop-up will open up in your neighborhood and all of the foodies start going there, and they’ve just kinda remixed the ingredients a little bit, and for two weeks all everyone wants to talk about is this restaurant.

This post explores whether this pop-up restaurant theory can be applied to apps in general, not just social media.