I've been seeing several creators running contests on BeReal where they give away stuff if you share your daily photo. Honestly, it makes me a bit suspicious because the app is still pretty small. Has anyone actually won anything real in these contests or is it all just hype?
I wouldn't recommend it if you have to share personal data or do complicated tracking, because those contests on small apps are usually more marketing tricks than anything else. People who actually win something do exist, but they're a minority and most of the time it's just digital prizes or discounts that aren't worth much. If you want to try it anyway, stick to the ones that are straightforward and don't require anything more than uploading your normal BeReal photo, but honestly it's hard to say the effort is worth it!
Most of those contests on small apps work more as a trick to get you to participate and download the app than as actual prizes, so your distrust is justified. What the others don't mention is that BeReal specifically has a pretty closed algorithm - it's not like Instagram where a contestant can easily promote themselves, so the people who "win" often end up being the creator's friend or a fake account. If you ever decide to give it a shot, look for the prize to be something digital or for the creator to have a visible history of past giveaways, because otherwise you're just giving your attention away for free.
I think the main risk here is that a lot of those contests use your photos to build face databases without you really understanding what they're going to do with them! Sure, some of them do give away real stuff, but most of it is just to hook new users and pump up their participation metrics, and then you forget about the prize anyway. If you decide to enter one, read carefully what permissions you're giving and don't share more data than what your daily photo already shows, because that you can't get back.
BeReal started as an app for unfiltered photos and gained traction mainly in 2022, so it's been around for a few years now, but your point about contests still holds up. The thing is, a lot of those giveaways are smaller than they seem: the creator puts up a $50 USD prize or some random product, but the actual reach is minimal because the app still doesn't have Instagram or TikTok's scale. So yeah, there are people who've won stuff, but the odds are pretty low compared to contests on bigger platforms.
What nobody's mentioned yet is the screenshot thing 📸 BeReal literally notifies you if someone takes a screenshot of your photo, so some of those contests ask you to do exactly that to participate. Depending on who's running the giveaway, you'd be sending your photo to accounts that might not be that verified, and even though it sounds paranoid, there's precedent for bots collecting images from these apps to train models. It's not like it's some crazy risk, just something worth thinking about.
If you really want to participate, check who's running the contest (verified creator, history of past giveaways) and don't give any extra info beyond what they ask for. But honestly, the chances of winning something actually useful are low, so it's not worth it if it makes you uncomfortable 😅
Technically yeah, there are people who've actually won stuff, but honestly the reality is pretty murky. I know someone who entered one of those BeReal contests a few months back and they did actually get the prize (it was a gift card to a store), so it's not like everything's completely fake. The real issue is that most of those contests are designed to pump up numbers and grow creators more than they are to hand out real prizes, so the proportion of winners compared to participants is tiny. If you're skeptical about it, trust your gut: the risks of sharing photos and personal data outweigh what you'd probably actually win!
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