Here's why more than 1 million users—including Pink and Ice-T—are flocking to video messaging app Marco Polo amid COVID-19’s 'epidemic of loneliness'
The real secret to Marco Polo’s success may lie in its simplicity. Unlike bandwidth-sucking real-time video chat platforms like Zoom or Apple’s FaceTime, video messages are exchanged more like text messages. Glitchy broadband won’t disrupt the conversation and recipients are free to respond in their own time. Voice-changing options such as “helium” and “macho man” and to the fun, and Instagram-style filters are also available.
Unlike Snapchat, “there are no social comparisons, no counts of likes,” she says. “You can just talk, you don’t have to worry about ‘how many likes is Polo going to get?” Bortnik also notes that Marco Polo is ad-free and private, with no feeds full of strangers to scroll through. “It’s really for your closest friends,” she says. “It’s not for the whole world to see.”
“You’re talking to your mom, you’re talking to your sisters, so there’s not that need to put on a show. You can just be yourself,” Bortnik says. The app is less of a “highlights reel of one’s life” or a place to showcase feigned happiness, and more like the “Finstas,” the ironically named “fake Instagram” accounts in which social media users show their “real” selves. Bortnik says she hopes communication on Marco Polo takes on a more casual and “real” tone.
Long before this recent streak of popularity, Bortnik says her mission has been to cure the existing epidemic of loneliness, which is being exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
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