F.Y.I: This is a thought experiment, Not a prediction, that I am trying out and I would like feedback. I got the idea from a forecasting book where you choose something true today and flip it so it isn’t true 10 years from now plus giving the reason why (the book’s name was imaginable). I am trying to do that and include a more detailed timeline of events.
Statement: Most Social Media platforms are funded through advertisements.
Flipped Statement: In ten years most social media platforms aren’t funded through advertisements.
2024
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Economic pressures cause more social media companies to push for a greater return on investment which in turn causes them to push for more ads, higher premiums, and more actively blocking loopholes.
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The fediverse continues to grow in numbers and more organizations start using the platform as their main base of operations because it gives them more control over how they want to present themselves and a more fine-grained look into user data which they in turn use to optimize their content.
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The US presidential election causes a lot of turmoil on social media platforms as there becomes a more active effort to push people’s opinions in one way or another causing some burnout and pushing people to either move to alternative platforms where there is less active interference or a general downturn in social media use in general.
2025-2026
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An increase in data breaches worldwide causes a renewed effort to make self-hosting data servers cheaper and more accessible for customers which leads to some development in personal hosting of data.
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Social media platforms that mainly run through creator-based content begin to start changing terms of service to extract more revenue from the creators, such as changes to how much of a cut the platform gets when a creator is being sponsored among other things. This leads to a backlash among creators who in response put in more effort to move into paid subscription services like Nebula.
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Some drama happens between For-profit companies joining the fediverse and some servers colluding with such companies which in turn causes some major user pushback and a shift in the user distribution among the servers. This also causes servers to more explicitly enshrine an attitude against for-profit companies in their code of ethics. Servers are still run on donations but donating is more encouraged than before.
2027-2028
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There is an ongoing resurgence of indie creators who start gaining traction and decide to start moving to alternative platforms such as Nebula to gain a more direct stream of revenue. This in turn draws some attention away from mainstream social media platforms. These alternative platforms also allow creators to start setting some of their videos to be free to watch so that the platform itself gets more traction and viewers.
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Software and hardware developers are creating better networking solutions so the burden of traffic becomes less of a problem over time allowing for hosting services to handle higher traffic more cheaply.
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Companies who are trying to streamline their business to gain more profits start trying to find where they can make budget cuts. After seeing smaller businesses succeed with more direct social media advertising and AI technology has advanced a bit decided to try and automate the promotion of products at the right time and right place using fake user accounts. As a consequence, they significantly reduce their spending on direct advertising on social media sites.
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After more election shenanigans happen but this time more supercharged than before there is a push for more walled-off communities where it is easier to have relations with users and identify bad actors. This second surge affects the admins of the fediverse, who after dealing with some interference before decide to take a more cautious approach in accepting new users and setting up ways of monitoring the effects of the choices they make (the admins’ choices not users’) PS: This is assuming US elections still take place at this time but even if it doesn’t I believe these techniques might still become more common anyways.
2029-2030
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The user experience of the fediverse has improved a lot as there are more features for users, it is easier to moderate, and hosting servers are much cheaper. The fediverse would now be considered semi-mainstream.
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Due to shifts in marketing spending, mainstream social media companies decide to pivot their funding strategy and instead tap into their massive pre-existing databases, advanced algorithms, and knowledge of social phenomenons to produce more directly profitable products for other companies like creating their automated promotion bots, advising on distribution techniques based on detailed user data, etc.
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Some creator-driven platforms have started to implement a format where they make all of their videos free to watch and it is now a platform where you subscribe with how much you want to subscribe and the profit is distributed based on what the viewers watch.
This isn’t necessarily the timeframe that I think things will happen just the most convenient numbers I could think of.
Also, does anyone know of any communities where they make narrative predictions of the future similar to this? I’ve heard of prediction markets where there are numeric forecasts and reasons why you make certain predictions but they usually don’t flesh out their reasoning steps that happen from point A to point B which doesn’t help give a more fleshed-out understanding of the world.
There is a fair bit of research on what makes people good at predicting, see the good judgement project, in particular there is this article:
TL;DR: speculating is fun but you should also look at the facts
I don’t think proprietary social media is going to collapse , mark zuckerberg got a perfact SAT score, Thinking he won’t notice his platform will degrade in quality is IMO wishful thinking.
I honestly don’t think that any big company nowadays can collapse (look at how Digg is still a thing) but I do think that they can shift their strategy on how they monetize their users or more generally present content on their platform (like YouTube with shorts). That’s partially why I didn’t say the fediverse was mainstream and also why I didn’t say that those media companies would collapse but instead made a point about where they might try and get their money from instead if advertising dwindled.
Also, I said this wasn’t a prediction and made the timeline with a foregone conclusion.
I highly recommend Stephen Tetlock’s book, super forecasting, who is the sponsor of the project you mention.
One method of forecasting that he identified as effective was using a spreadsheet to record events that might occur over the next 6-18 months along with an initial probability based on good judgement and the factors you quoted. Then, every day look for new information that adjusts the forecast up or down by some, usually small percent. Repeat, and the goal is you will trend towards a reasonable %. I omitted many details but that was the jist.
Now, that’s for forecasting on a short ish timeframe. There is a place for more open ended reasoning and imagination, but you have to be careful not to fall prey to your own biases.
This particular forecast of OPs feels like it is ignoring several long running trends in technology adoption and user behavior without giving events that would address them, and forecasts something they care about doing better in the long-term, a source of bias to watch. I tend to agree with you that I think elements of this forecast are flawed.
Which ones?
The difficulty you’re going to have in trying to start some discourse around this, I think, is that it’s much easier to find a reason for why a forecast is wrong than it is to engage in the actual task of forecasting.
So lots of naysayers, who may even have excellent points, but can’t contribute or help you improve.
Staring a community might be a really cool idea to help with this.
Same thing happens in science where plenty can criticise your work without being able to really offer any help.
Do you have any tips on how I could get started?
I’ve noticed this quite a bit among people I talk to and honestly just doesn’t help move the conversation anywhere meaningful.
What do you expect? If you have a way to improve the fediverse then just start a project or at least make a suggestion (although i doubt that’s helpful).
Having something like an open source version of good judgement open might make things more interesting, at least it will be possible to detect “superforcaster” and direct people attention to them.