In an age where “content” is perpetually shoved down our throats, Vero, a new social media platform that has recently blown up, is here to help you micromanage that content and make your life (maybe) a little bit more manageable. You might be wondering, why the hell would we need another app to mindlessly pour precious hours into?
Well, the concept is simple, Vero lets you further categorise your contacts into more groups compared with Facebook’s “friends” or “follower’s” system. Vero has “close friends”, “friends”, “acquaintances” and “followers”. While this sounds like a lot of bother, Vero will let you post any kind of content – movies, photos, books, locations, TV, articles – and completely control who sees what content.
Want to share your obsession with trashy memes with only your nearest and dearest? No problem at all.
On top of this, Vero is advertisement free so they won’t mine your data and companies can’t pay to boost their content on your feed. Furthermore, unlike Facebook and Instagram who have now curated your feed on your behalf, Vero is always chronological so you won’t miss anything that your closest friends post.
Vero’s manifesto is bold (literally, and in block CAPS too): “THE GREATEST SOCIAL NETWORK IS THE ONE THAT ALREADY EXISTS BETWEEN PEOPLE. VERO’S MISSION IS TO MAKE IT AVAILABLE ONLINE.”
So, what’s the catch? Well, without adverts, in order for Vero to make any money at all, they’ve had to turn to an annual-subscription based model that charges a fee. Fortunately, they’re currently offering free subscriptions to the first million users.
Despite the fact that Vero has been around since 2015, interest has suddenly spiked and their servers just can’t hack; with outages being reported and regular apologetic tweets from the Vero camp:
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
To wrap it all up, it’ll be damn hard to pull people away from their Facebook and Instagram addictions but, if it works, even if we can’t escape tech, we might develop a healthier, purer relationship with it.
