Each year I like to ask you all for your predictions about the year ahead and compare them with my own. It is necessary to check in on the predictions I made a year ago. I should try to make more daring predictions this year because I think I did well.
Europe is the most important tech regulators in the world.
The United States didn't pass a single tech regulation despite one party having control of the executive and legislative branches It was reported this week that Apple is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its devices because the EU requires it. The Digital Markets Act took effect in November. The United Kingdom's Age-Appropriate Design Code was copied by the state of California. There are no signs that the tech world that Americans live in will change in the near future.
I said that the shake downs of platforms and their employees would accelerate.
There were threats against employees of Apple and Google in Russia in the year 2020. The invasion of Ukraine accelerated threats against platform employees in Russia. As a result, almost every tech company left the country. There were less instances of goons roughing up tech workers. I was happy to be wrong here and maybe it was more behind the scenes.
I said that drama is back on social media.
The most naive person in the world wrote here last December 18th, asking if Parag Agrawal would be able to hold off activist shareholders. A man who was getting closer to the truth asked if the whole thing would be sold to Salesforce by the year's end. Someone who was completely missing the point asked what the company would do in the meantime. A reporter who had finally gotten something right said he expected things to get messier before they stabilizing.
The best thing to say about the metaverse is that it is still being built.
The reality is that the discussions of the metaverse were going on all year until the moment that Musk boughtTwitter. Given that Apple's headset got delayed into next year, and Meta's Quest Pro got a mostly disappointing reception, I think I had this one correct. There is still plenty of talent and money going into augmented and virtual reality, though somewhat less of it, due to some steep layoffs at most of the companies involved this year.
There is a long-term religious war set up over the potential and perils of the block chain.
This happened as the skeptics came together to advance their project. And Web3 is Going Just Great was one of the best new publications of the year.
The all-out war between pro- and anti-crypto forces never happened because the skeptics were right about everything. NFT sales collapsed, TerraUSD collapsed, and then a bunch of related collapses lead up to the biggest and most criminal swan dive of them all in Sam Bankman- Fried's FTX. There are still a lot of people who are encouraging their fellow bag-holders not to worry. The people lost the benefit of the doubt in 2022.
The media will leave the social networking site. Musk's promotion of right-wing causes and personality will push away more and more high-profile users, who find themselves increasingly put off by his shock-jock antics. Mastodon is an alternative platform that offers a safe haven to more and more people. The US press will no longer be able to set the daily news agenda by default by the end of the decade. Many publishers have wished their reporters wouldn't spend so much time on social media.
Parler and Truth Social fold as Musk makes both of them redundant Donald Trump's account has been restored.
There will be a national conversation about artificial intelligence. The New York Times published an article about it yesterday, and I cheated a bit by not mentioning it. The technology will spread by word of mouth among kids home from school over the winter break, and I think this conversation will accelerate in the next few years. By the end of the year, we will have seen a lot of controversy related to the use of artificial intelligence in education around the country.
The rear view shows the web3 vision fading. The events of 2022, which made pro-crypto partisans look like fools, and the threat of a recession, will make venture capitalists more cautious in the new year. The failure of the industry to make meaningful advances in security, user experience, or almost anything I suggested in January means that it will continue to be of interest to die hards. The industry is at heightened risk of being regulated into irrelevance due to the continued parade of scam, breach, and bankruptcies.
Content will be banned in some areas. The social media laws passed in Texas and Florida will be upheld by the supreme court. Users will be asked if they would prefer a moderated version of the service if they sign in to a new version of the site. The opt-in data we get from this experiment may be beneficial for everyone.
There will be an ad network. The first step in building an ad network is to say you won't do it. Substack, the service that distributes the platformer newsletter, has taken such a step before. Since then, a lot has changed. The company has struggled to grow revenues fast enough to raise a Series B round of fundraising at its desired valuation; limiting its revenue opportunities to subscriptions has deprived it of the larger stream of revenue in every big publisher's arsenal. Substack got good at growing free email lists but not at converting them to paid readers.
The company has millions of email addresses at its disposal, but it doesn't make a lot of money from them. Substack doesn't have to act because the company's need to grow is too obvious. Substack will introduce a native advertising solution by the end of the year.
Meta will probably launch a second brand. They won't be able to buy Mastodon, Post News or Parler, so most likely they will build a simple feed. Folks will be able to import their social graph into the new app.
According to the New York Times, Meta is talking about this. It should. I think it has the product, design, and moderation capabilities needed to build a big centralized Twitter clone. It would probably need a counter-intuitive twist in order to get traction. It is not the first time that Facebook has copied something. It should attempt again.
The prediction is that Musk will testify before the new Republican House Majority in a hearing about the online woke mind virus.
I won't speak to the perjury, but it's likely that House Republicans will summon Musk so that they can praise him and send clips of themselves exchanging pleasantries. I think Musk would like to testify during the Hunter Biden laptop hearing.
I'm hello! Theera of many social platforms, where people's attention will start to atomize across multiple platforms that each meet the needs of specific, different audiences, will begin in 2023. This era will cause headaches for brands trying to figure out where they spend their money because many platforms will make enough money to be viable businesses.
The landscape of social networks is not stable. In the United States, Facebook is running out of steam, while TikTok is getting banned from government devices. Mastodon, Post, and Hive are some of the names that will be replaced in the next year or so. The question is, once unbundled, how quickly social networks will bundle up again, and whether a new thing can still come out of nowhere to dominate our attention.
TikTok Search will become more powerful, leading to greater competition with Google, and a key component in Byte Dance's plans to boost its social commerce plans.
ByteDance is smart to lean into the fact that people are already writing about TikTok being better for certain searches.
I think there will be a wave of Gen-Z TikTokers going to the movies. There will be a big summer movie season in the second half of the 20th century.
This was the one that I thought was the most plausible. I used to go to the drive-in when I was a kid for nostalgia. I'll pay for it.
I will check in to see how we did a year from now, thanks to everyone who predicted.
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