Noplace Is a Social Networking App That Is Not (Yet) Intended for Adults
On Friday afternoon, my bosses asked if I would like to test and explain Noplace , a new social media platform that skyrocketed to the top of the Apple Store charts when it switched from “recommendations only” to “free for everyone.” When I was asked to do this with BeReal two years ago , I fell in love with the app and had been using it with friends all summer, so I was thrilled. Perhaps Noplace, touted as “the MySpace for Gen Z,” will be the same—a fun platform for my friends and I to play on for the rest of the warmer months. I downloaded it, impressed by its commitment to the custom themes and colors that defined my social media use when I was a kid, coding pet pages on Neopets and learning HTML so my LiveJournal could reflect on the outside what I felt on the inside. Here’s what I found.
What is Noplace?
Noplace is bright and colorful, promising to bring together people with similar interests. You get a profile page that you can customize by changing the colors and even the borders around the text fields. Like old Facebook, there is a “wall” where your friends can post public messages to you. Like LiveJournal, your profile has built-in sections where you can post what you’re eating, listening to, or doing. Just like MySpace, you can publicly rate your best friends. Like any other platform, there is a direct messaging component. And like X, there’s a tab where you can post what you’re thinking or feeling and strangers can respond.
I’ve been fiddling with the app for three days, but I still don’t understand how it connects people with similar interests. On Noplace, your interests are called “stars”, so I chose a few stars from the suggested categories: for example, Fortnite in the “video games” section. I noticed that many of the possible stars were vague – “astrology”, “LGBTQ”, “reading” – so I created my own in the search bar. I was into baseball and the Minnesota Twins, and then I added a spin class. But it was never possible to find or contact other people who chose these stars. They just appeared on my profile. It was a little sad, but I don’t rule out that I just couldn’t understand it.
How does Noplace work?
I started posting on a feed-style public forum right after I quickly put together a profile that was all purple, posted a photo of myself, and alerted any potential new friends that I was listening to Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever” eating a bag of dried snacks from seaweed. It really felt like 2004. I couldn’t believe I was spending so much time on real-time updates back then, especially considering I was doing it all from a desktop computer tethered to a huge monitor in my basement back in the day. to smartphones.
I asked how to increase my “level” and someone kindly responded by informing me that to do this I would need to be more interactive in the app. I looked at their profile. They were young teenagers. I started looking at more profiles that I found in the feed. All appeared to be between 14 and 20 years old. I felt uneasy. At best, I felt like an outsider, and at worst, an asshole. Not ideal. I decided to get my friends to join so I could at least be among my peers. This part was easy: I just had to click the “invite friends” button in the search tab and then send them all a text message. Further proof that I’m too old for this was when I noticed that even after I imported my contacts, no one on the list seemed to be in the app yet. Things got even worse when two of my best friends who use Android phones told me that Android apps don’t even exist. My iPhone-using buddies and I had to sneak in on our own.
While I was waiting for them to set up their profiles and add me back, I started writing shit. One teenager publicly asked if they should watch Yellowjackets , and I said no. Another posted a message with a hint of melancholy, saying: “Sorry for the inconvenience.” I told them it was no problem even though I had no idea what they were talking about. The level of posts was also very reminiscent of my formative years on Xanga and LiveJournal: there were a lot of complaints about parents, expressions of boredom and self-identification to the point of absurdity. Roughly speaking, these were ordinary children’s things, exactly the same as what I published 20 years ago. Efforts have obviously been made to create the perfect layout, the most complete and stylish bio, and the most incisive posts. Every now and then I’d see someone older write something like, “Is there anyone my age here?” The answer was no.
Should you join Noplace?
I don’t think you need to join Noplace if you’re an adult – at least not right now. My guess is that, like Facebook, it will quickly become overrun by disgruntled adults. Now we are dissatisfied adults. The problem with this app is that, at least in its current form, there is no real division between children and the elderly. Everyone posts in the same big feed, and like I said, there’s no particular way to sort and find people with similar interests or demographics. You’re posting with 14 year olds while they’re doing standard 14 year old stuff, trying to figure out who they are and who they want to portray themselves as.
I was able to reach level 3 by just publishing a bunch of posts, but I got bored with it pretty quickly. The allure of constantly updating my profile to reveal my relationship status, current snack, and favorite song didn’t last long, especially since it felt strange to pass on this information to children.
It definitely has potential and was fun for a while. Like I said, adults will get into this thing and I’m sure it will become more striped. I can see the appeal of going back to our roots, playing with profile designs and sharing unimportant news about unimportant things, but at the moment you can’t post links or photos. There is nothing mature or constructive to be found. It is impossible to contact anyone with whom you have something in common. Even though everyone is posting together, it feels a little lonely, at least for those of us who lived through the first great era of customization.