Could Dispo Make Social Media Fun Again?

I’ve accumulated many cringe-worthy memories in my lifetime, but let me share a specific one with you. It’s 2017. I’m standing in the limestone streets of Dubrovnik, Croatia. My left foot is placed strategically in front of my right, and I’m staring off into the distance at nothing in particular. A Stepford Wife smile is plastered on my face. “Can you take a few more?” I ask my boyfriend at the time. “I’ve taken, like, a million,” he replies, exasperated. “We’re going to be late for dinner.”

But I’m convinced that we don’t have “it,” whatever “it” is. So I make him stand there and snap for several minutes. Other tourists meander through the frame, and even though it’s a public street in a peak travel season, I’m irrationally frustrated at their presence. Later, we sit at dinner. The sun is setting. The medieval city is bathed in a warm glow, its crumbling walls rosy with the reflection of the water. There’s a bottle of wine on the table, and we’re just about to share a salt-crusted fish, something I’ve never tried before. I ignore all of it. Instead, I sit there with my arms crossed, scrolling through selects on his camera. “Ugh, my dress looks wrinkled,” I pout.

You probably hate me in this story. (It’s okay, I do too.) But you’ve also probably been me. There’s a reason the phrases “doing it for the ’gram” and “doing it for the Vine” (RIP) became part of the cultural lexicon: As we became obsessed with using social media, we also became obsessed with how we presented ourselves on it. We wanted to be forever young despite our inevitable aging. We wanted to be world travelers despite having daily desk jobs. And we kept trudging through this impossible quest of picture-posting perfection even though it was making us miserable: A 2018 study from Psychology Bulletin found that, perhaps thanks partly to social media, college students and 20-somethings held themselves to standards way higher than previous generations. “Raw data suggest that social media use pressures young adults to perfect themselves in comparison to others, which makes them dissatisfied with their bodies and increases social isolation,” the study reports. “Today’s young people are competing with each other in order to meet societal pressures to succeed, and they feel that perfectionism is necessary in order to feel safe, socially connected, and of worth.”

“I know how important flexing for the ’gram is. People always want to show off their life and let others in on the cool parts,” YouTuber and social-media personality David Dobrik tells me over the phone from Los Angeles. He’s pragmatic about it—“That’s never going away,” he says—but also, well, sick of it. “Like, everybody at a concert always wants to take a picture. Yeah, do that, but then enjoy the rest of the concert.”

That’s why, in 2019, he started a new Instagram account: @davidsdisposables. As the name implies, Dobrik only posted pictures taken on his disposable camera. He wasn’t alone in adapting this aesthetic—Gigi Hadid, for example, has @gisposable—and Dobrik says he picked up the practice from a few friends who also played around with the old-school snaps. They all loved it for the same reason: With an iPhone, you can review (and subsequently agonize over) your photos right after you take them. But with a disposable, you have no clue how they’re going to turn out.

A few months later, he decided to turn that concept into a photo app: David’s Disposables.

David’s Disposables essentially turned your phone screen into an old-school Fujifilm. Users could only see their subject matter through a little window on their screen. To take a picture, you pressed a giant green button. Flash was optional but highly recommended. And here’s the most important part: Once you took a picture, you couldn’t see it until it was “developed” the next morning. “You don’t worry about how it looks,” Dobrik says. “You capture the moment, and then you keep going.”

The reception was immediate and positive. So Dobrik spent the next year expanding the idea into something bigger: a social network called Dispo.

In mid-February, it began beta testing to the public. Now, you can share your retro-looking photos to Rolls visible on your profile. You can also add friends, essentially making it a shared album. Within a week, it was the fourth-most downloaded app on the App store. According to Axios, its valuation now stands at around 200 million. “It brings the joy back to taking photos,” Dobrik says.

I still remember my first Instagram. It was objectively terrible—I took it half-drunk at a college football tailgate in 2011. Two of my friends had propped themselves up on a cooler. I noticed they both wore jean shorts and black Converses, something that, at age 19, I thought was super cool and artsy. “Stay right there!” I yelled as I snapped an off-center picture of their legs. I uploaded it right then and there to my newly created account, @ejtay. (Even in those early days of Instagram, my super-common last name wasn’t available.) “Shoes shoes shoes,” was my caption—a nod to, you guessed it, that “Shoes” YouTube video—and my filter of choice was Lo-fi. I don’t remember how many likes it got because, at that time, I wasn’t counting.

I deleted it in 2016. That was the year I decided that all my Instagrams needed to fit my personal brand. Now, I had no idea what my personal brand was, but pictures of muddy shoes, I decided, weren’t it. Neither was a picture of my beloved childhood beagle or a purple crocus I’d spotted on an afternoon run. (“Spring has sprung!” I cheerfully wrote.) With a few clicks, they vanished from my page forever.

Five years later, I miss them. Well, maybe not the photos themselves. I mean, I amped up the saturation so high on my dog’s photo that his brown fur turned orange. But I miss what they represented: an era where I had a casual, who-cares approach to social media. Where I actually considered it, well, fun.

I downloaded Dispo on February 13. That same night, I had a few friends over for drinks on my patio. It wasn’t anything special—I laid out two bottles of rosé, a cheese plate, chips, and guacamole that I didn’t even bother scooping out of the container—but I eagerly snapped away on the app regardless. “What are you taking a picture of?” one friend asked. “I can’t really tell!” I replied back.

The entire night, I felt so light and airy. At first, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. But then I realized: It was the first time in a while that I hadn’t felt like I needed to get “perfect” social-media shots of the evening—and that it was a personal failure if I didn’t.

The next morning, at 9 a.m., my Dispos were available to view. There were some clunkers: people blurry, views too dark, faces shot from way too close up. But the rest were candid, scrappy, and, to me, perfect.