With an average of just 2.5 friends per youngster, China’s Gen Z is without a doubt in the grips of a friendship recession. Soul App, a favored social app of Chinese Zoomers, found that youngsters are having an increasingly rough time striking meaningful friendships. Unfortunately, legacy social networking platforms such as Facebook and Instagram aren’t helping much.
Despite hyper socialization and hyper-connectivity, Gen Z faces a paucity of authentic connections and friendships based on shared interests. The fact that “anti emo”, “buddy search” and “authentic personas” were the other buzzwords, along with “friendship recession” on Soul App in 2023 indicates that Gen Z has a strong desire for belonging and is faced with emotional turmoil.
Soul’s head of marketing center, Amanda Fan pinned this on the fast pace of life and increased geographical mobility. She explained that the need for socializing is what is spurring the younger generation to explore new ways to connect.
The problem with legacy social networks is that the omnipresent pressure of always looking the best and feeling the happiest and having the most fun in all photographs and posts actually leads to intense anxiety and even worsens depression.
Moreover, on these traditional platforms, online connections are merely an extension of the user’s offline circle. So, there is the ever-prevalent fear of judgment, not to mention that the connections may not tie back to mutual interests at all. Together, these factors have increased the disconnect between Gen Z and legacy platforms.
On the other hand, new-age social networks like Soul App, Discord, and BeReal have gained significant traction among youngsters because they are doing things differently. For instance, as of 2022, Soul had nearly 30 million monthly active users, and 80% of them were Chinese Gen Z.
Similarly, in 2023, Discord had accumulated a user base exceeding 563 million users worldwide and the majority of them were Zoomers. Along the same lines, back in last year, BeReal had approximately 25 million monthly active users and the majority of their user base also comprised Zoomers.
The popularity of these “New Kids on the Block”, so to speak, is understandable. Gen Z has strikingly different psychological and socialization needs as compared to millennial and older generations. For example, in China, nearly all members of this cohort are only children. They face an astounding degree of academic and professional pressure. Then there is the stress of dealing with and being prepared for an ever-changing industrial and economic landscape.
These youngsters lack company despite being constantly connected. These unique factors have shaped individuals who value empowerment, have a strong independent streak, an overarching desire to make money and be healthy, and a yearning for emotional companionship.
In a nutshell, Gen Z craves attention from like-minded people; they want someone to listen to them and they want this someone to be a person with whom they have a connection based on shared interests and life aspects.
So, the popularity of new-age social platforms is firmly owed to their ability to meet the connectivity and socialization needs of Zoomers. A classic example of how these platforms have fine-tuned socialization for Gen Z is in the way they have managed to address the challenges of whether to give priority to content over pre-existing social circles or vice versa.
While Soul, Discord, and BeReal all take a different approach to socialization, a common thread is that they all prioritize content by focusing on different aspects of online communication and social interaction.
Soul builds communities based on shared interests and values. On Discord, the emphasis is on voice/video/text-based interactions and online communities and BeReal encourages authentic, real-time moments. In other words, these platforms offer users a space to engage in meaningful conversations, share their experiences, and build genuine connections with others.
The mode of interaction differs across these platforms. But at the core of it, they manage to help users with a highly valued aspect of socialization – Deep, meaningful, and authentic connections that aren’t based on likes, dislikes, followers, or even the picture-perfect profiles of legacy platforms. Case in point, Soul App that embraces interest socialising with its avatar-driven interactions.
This unique approach breaks down social barriers and pressures and allows users to connect based on their true selves and shared interests, without relying on carefully curated online personas. Other Soul App features that are exclusively aimed at meeting the emotional and socialization needs of Zoomers include:
- Spiritual connections backed by AI: Soul uses an AI algorithm-driven recommendation system named Lingxi to pair users with “soulmates” based on their interests, personality traits, and conversation goals.
- Buiding up diverse communities: Soul prioritizes text chat as well as voice, encouraging deeper, real-time interactions that build stronger bonds. On this platform, you can discover common interests and never run out of things to chat about in various audio group chats with different people. The feature enables this is called Audio Partyroom, which leads to a more empathetic experience, building up diverse communities based on interests and fostering genuine connections like those in real-life.
- Responding to every thought: The interactions done by Soul’s users are pushed to the broader community by Soul Square, which is similar to WeChat “Moments”, and the platform’s decentralized recommendation system, which secures all the posts released on Soul Square will receive similar rates of viewing and engagement. On Soul, every thought is valid and will not go unheard. And this is how Soul brings its users a sense of belonging.
While Soul App offers a community-like feel, Discord is sort of like a digital clubhouse built around shared interests. The platform also has private voice and text chatrooms dedicated to everything from K-pop groups to competitive gaming. So, users can hang out with like-minded individuals in real time, forging deeper connections that go beyond text-based social media interactions. Some of the features of this platform include:
- Servers that are community-driven: These foster communities around shared interests, creating a sense of belonging and reducing isolation. Unlike curated feeds on traditional platforms, Discord servers allow users to actively seek out and engage with like-minded individuals.
- Voice and text chat: Discord’s focus on real-time communication fosters deeper connections compared to primarily text-based platforms.
- Anonymity coupled with self-expression: Discord allows users to create avatars and choose usernames, providing a degree of anonymity that can be liberating, especially for those facing social anxieties.
BeReal is a platform based on the motto “Be Real, for Two Minutes.” Once a day, at a random time, users have two minutes to capture and share what they’re doing. Unlike the carefully curated content on traditional platforms, BeReal encourages authenticity and vulnerability. In essence, the platform promotes real-time connections based on the everyday moments that make up life. Some of BeReal’s features are:
- Ephemeral content: The platform’s disappearing posts reduce pressure related to online image and perfectionism and take away the fear of putting out something that will come to haunt a person in the future. This encourages more relaxed and open interactions, potentially mitigating loneliness.
- Authenticity and vulnerability: Since BeReal only offers a two-minute window for posting unfiltered photos once a day, it encourages genuine, in-the-moment sharing. This is in stark contrast to the highlight reels on traditional platforms.
- Focus on real-world activities: The platform encourages sharing current moments, so it prompts users to engage in real-world activities and potentially connect with those around them.
While on the surface many of the features of these three differ from each other, closer scrutiny reveals that they are all aimed at achieving two specific goals that set them apart from legacy platforms:
- Real-time engagement: Interactions on these platforms foster a sense of presence, unlike the asynchronous nature of traditional platforms.
- Reduced pressure: The focus on authenticity on these platforms helps reduce social anxiety and encourage more open communication while combating loneliness.
Despite all of this, neither of these platforms is a panacea for all that ails the social lives of Zoomers. Also, these platforms have their fair share of limitations and there is always the risk of cyberbullying, online fraud, and addiction.
Fortunately, some of these social platforms, like Soul App fiercely protect their users and ecosystem with a range of security features, real-time information exchange with their users, and community content curation.
Ultimately, finding healthy ways to connect and combat loneliness requires individual effort and a balance between online and offline interactions. But, unlike legacy social networks, at the least, these new-age platforms help users handle their online interactions in a positive way and create bridges between online and offline connections.