Instagram Killer: What you need to know about Vero's new social network

Dmitry Kurkin

At the end of February, millions of people learn about vero - a platform that serves itself as a "truly social network", free from the flaws of facebook, instagram and twitter. New subscribers, the creators of the application are lured by the lack of advertising, flexible privacy settings, which allows you to "post anything and it is for those who you want to show it," and, not least, a free subscription, which may soon end.

The sharply increased popularity, however, has already played a cruel joke with the new social network, which technically cannot cope with the influx of users. And this is not the only claim to the new-fangled app, which observers are skeptical so far. Let's try to figure out what Vero is and whether it can compete with the usual social networks.

Delayed start

In general, the application was launched in 2015, but outside the fascinating world of Silicon Valley startups, it became known only recently - at the end of February 2018. Then the creators of Vero announced that for the first million users the subscription will be free.

In just a few days, the application scored almost three million users and reached the first lines in the AppStore and Google Play ratings (despite the fact that the first million subscriptions have long been exhausted, Vero remains free), although before that it was downloaded a total of less than one hundred fifty thousand times . For most reviewers, this turned out to be a surprise, because the creators of the “right social network” didn’t open an open campaign: the users of instagram and twitter advertised their application.

The explosion of Vero’s popularity cannot be truly explained by anyone. Most likely, the chain reaction worked: as soon as the social network manages to convince a sufficient number of people that “all their friends are already there,” they start registering, just to keep up with the trend, and pull other acquaintances behind them, increasing the avalanche. Surely it worked and the trick with the promise to make Vero "life free" for the first users.

"Instagram Killer"

Although Vero is sometimes called anti-fabsbook, most still consider the new application to be an instagram competitor - it was from there that the mass exodus of users to the promised social network occurred. In Vero (for now) there is no advertising, it sorts posts in the tape in chronological order (which is again different from instagram and, to a lesser extent, from Facebook, where the display priority must be set manually). In addition, the user can choose one of the four privacy levels of each of their posts: for followers, acquaintance, friends (close friends). This is a slightly more flexible system than Instagram and Twitter with open and closed accounts, but Vero is not much different from Facebook with its privacy settings.

It’s still too early to talk about how safe Vero is. But it is worth paying attention that to create a page on behalf of another person in it is not so difficult. Vero does not require identity verification, which means that he cannot solve the problem of fake accounts.

Technical problems and dark reputation of the creators

The CEO of Vero is held by one of its co-founders, Ayman Hariri, a billionaire and son of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who died in 2005 as a result of a terrorist act. Ayman inherited from his father, among other things, the construction company Saudi Oger, and along with it - a dubious reputation. In 2016, when Hariri left the board, Saudi Oger found herself at the center of a major scandal after the strike of labor migrants hired by her, who complained about non-payment of wages and slave labor conditions. A year later, the company was liquidated by the government of Saudi Arabia. Conspiracyologists also have some complaints about Vero who, having seen Russians among the developers of the application, have suspected him of having links with the Kremlin and the FSB. But these flashes of paranoia, perhaps, are better left without comment.

Special attention is drawn to the user agreement. It gives the creators of Vero the right to use the content published on the network without any restrictions and the need to pay copyright. That is, no matter what privacy settings are set, publishing something in Vero partially alienates your copyright. However, in this new network is not fundamentally different from other social networks, where there are also problems with copyright.

Most questions to Vero, however, are related to purely technical problems. The network, apparently, cannot cope with the influx of users, which is why many of them cannot log in for hours or create a post. Vero's tech support promises to "solve problems as soon as possible," but it's hard to say how long the users will be patient.