In Aug. 2022, Nikita Bier, founder of the hit app of 2017, TBH, launched a new social media app, Gas. According to the Gas website, “Gas is an app to compliment your friends. With Gas, it’s always free to compliment your friends but we offer upgrades that make things more interesting.” However, these “more interesting” things have led to quite the controversy. 

  Instead of most social media apps, which allow you to see who views, likes or comments on posts, Gas has users vote anonymously for either people in someone’s school or their selected friends on light-hearted polls. These polls then send alerts to the winner of the poll about the content of the poll, the voters gender and grade. However, the only way users can find out who specifically voted for them on a poll is to upgrade to God Mode, a weekly subscription, priced at a steep $6.99/week, that lets buyers reveal two of their voters a week.

 But, Bier claims, “It’s more fun when it’s a mystery anyway.” However, when a poll about a user comes from a mystery sender, it does little but boost their confidence if they don’t want to pay. However, Gas has other “paid” features using coins that are earned by participating in polls. For example, being able to put your name in a specific user’s poll. 

  I think that, though keeping the app ad-free by paying for it through God Mode is nice, having a paid subscription makes the app much less interactive for people that don’t want to pay their steep price. Most people only have the free version and are quickly losing interest in voting and seeing their votes. 

  If Gas wants to stay in its #1 spot on Apple’s Social Networking app chart, they should remove their paid subscription and add advertisements to supplement their revenue. This way, people will keep voting more realistically and use the app more for what it is for, personal connection. This connection is challenging to form when an individual doesn’t know who is voting for them. This challenge makes the app something that just consumes time instead of what consistently popular social networking apps (Snapchat, Instagram and BeReal) thrive in, which is a person-to-person or person-to-following connection. Gas must up their game, or risk being thrown out of the social networking game.