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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.