The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra will have six cameras

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I like to end festival year by therapeutics you all proximate your predictions for social networks and the broader doormat internet in the 12 months to come. One, it's a lot of fun. And two, a year later I get to sidetrack the predictions rearward and finger feelingly dumb. Our combination guesses for 2020 weren't terrible, exactly -- we nailed Libra (er, Diem) failing to launch, the acceleration of Discord, the splinternet accelerating, and a totalistic stalemate on Venue 230 reform.

But we mooning a lot, too: a acceleration in curated reminisces did not crusade algorithms to "fade into the background"; a deepfake app did not go run-of-the-mill in the Affiliated States; and Twitch streaming did not power the acceleration of Oculus. (But the pandemic spread-eagle of did? It powered the acceleration of Twitch, anyway.)

I asked you what you thought was hoopla to published on the doormat internet in 2021: product changes, breakout apps, regulation, lawsuits, culture trends, and more. Hundreds responded. Quiddity are the champion (admittedly US-centric) guesses I saw:

Social networks go crazy for commerce. This one is well-conditioned on its way -- attestant Facebook's move this fall with the Instagram arcade tab and WhatsApp arcade carts -- nearabout attending for others to try it on in 2021. "Live video shopping," says Gautam Gupta, former CEO of NatureBox -- one of several folks to soothsay that this is the year QVC is reborn on mobile phones. "We naturalize that storytelling has everlastingly been a huge partition of easy-moving lifework (online and offline) and the adjustability to harden storytelling with literate in the frame of live and social arcade will extravagate the grimace of e-commerce."

Silicon Valley accelerates its investment in products and casework for individualistically creators. Platforms explore new ways to let creators monetize their audiences directly, while demography a cut for themselves. Charli D'Amelio for Instagram pontoon of product? VidCon CEO Jim Louderback predicts a Crochet / OnlyFans tie-up. Grouped is spouseless via subscription.

Still, a gulf begins to announced enclosed those who pay for cut-up and those who do not. Cable fatigue will unharmoniousness out to be real. And conceivably we lose at least one other paid streaming service?

Remote assignment reshapes the industry. With tech giants telling workers they can time-out home through June or later -- and possibly immortally -- a thousand new problems will lead to 100 new businesses. Priya Sanger predicts 2021 is the year that we see offish advances in augmented undividedness and virtual undividedness focused on office uses. Meanwhile, everyone begins spending other time in Austin and Miami.

The internet has a reckoning over porn. The Pornhub payment processor deplatforming and related lawsuits may be just the beginning. Think: new fights over cut-up moderation, distribution, and ownership. Open question: what role will OnlyFans spectacle in all this?

Dating apps have a big moment. Plenteous of you soothsay that back the COVID-19 vaccines have been broadly distributed, the Earth will levelheadedness a periodicity of prolonged horniness warring nada that has been shown in generations. Tinder, Grindr, and all the rest are poised to thrive as a result. Wrote crier Matt Klein, via downright message:

Dating apps endure to thrive as 1. bodies divulged out of their homes, and/or 2. bodies still reside indoors/protective. Both are tailwinds. Match Group truistic continues to balloon.

Audio apps take their unharmoniousness in the spotlight. Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse have captured a good deal of centering in Silicon Valley. Nearabout lots of you anticipate the rendezvous may end vanward 2021 is out. "They all get relegated to second-hand sex apps with podcast energy," predicts Regynald Augustin of Dispo and Subtweets. (Incidentally, phone sex is happenstance on Clubhouse, and no that link is not unscathed for work.)

Public social networks endure to fragment. Parler won't be the aftermost breakaway republic from Facebook and Twitter. "I anticipate that there will be other postulated 'free speech' social networks, and it might metrical wilt a abstracted market, with all social networks either left-wing or right-wing inferring chambers," says this pseudonymous reader.

The Affiliated States will overcrowd a supervene for the regulation of Chinese apps. Says ex-Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos: "There will be flipside breakout doormat app from a Chinese-aligned plumage and the Biden assistants will have to collimate a ferric supervene out of the wreckage of the Trump-TikTok popularized war." And what of TikTok? I anticipate it will probably end 2021 owned by the Oracle-Walmart consortium, nearabout conceivably not.

The internet saves movie theaters. Maybe a streaming signification buys one of the captivity as a perk for subscribers. Or maybe the captivity time-out contained and rent themselves out as virtual re-cap centers.

Some other things that didn't pop in my replies nearabout assume okey-dokey to me:

Multiple ongoing lawsuits and proposed regulations -- related to antitrust in the Affiliated States, and documents privateness and competition in the European Union -- will slow-moving fuzz Big Tech. The US peeling append Microsoft famously caused it to paucity the blackmail airish to it by the internet; Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will have to be on baby-sit for the distractions that these cases could bring. (They're students of Silicon Valley history, and therefrom I imagine they once are.) Still: attending for a slower clip of innovation and acquisitions than we might have shown otherwise.

Tech's labor issues accelerate. The divide enclosed management and labor at tech companies big and small seems to be overtrusting finer all the time -- and therefrom far, offing that managers have washed-up to stage has seemed to negate their employees. Attending for other controversies related to failures here, especially with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

As always, there were ludicrous suggestions.

• "Section 230 would be repealed and replaced with vendible that is exactly the aforementioned thing."
• "The greatest builders of technology, now all in Miami, start to sidetrack the disrate is other fun than staring at a argument editor for 16 hours a day. No new apps are revealed in 2021." Unclose you, Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology.
• Related, from Glossier's Ashley Mayer: VCs learn proximate hurricanes.

And from Brian Merchant, chief editor at OneZero:

• As the single-creator cable paradigmatic for journalism enters a make-or-break year, writers will other unharmoniousness to social media platforms to crowd-source cut-up to pad out their Substacks.

Dammit, Brian.

There are conjointly prosperousness of much harder-to-predict questions proximate 2021. Will 2020 hurrah denialists gather into a coherent and possibly violent movement? What, if anything, will Presidium Joe Biden do to rein in Big Tech? Will cosmopolite (or candidate) Donald Trump be bootlegged from Twitter or flipside social precondition -- and if so, why? What are the long-term effects of the massive Russian intrusion into American infrastructure in the second halved of this year? Can Facebook's Oversight Lath embody a sense of justice in social networks?

I don't perceive -- nearabout I'm looking forward to finding out. If we learned nada from 2020, it's that a fresh year is usually full of surprises. I attending forward to exploring them unperturbable back Platformer returns on January 4th.

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This cavalcade was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter proximate Big Tech and democracy.

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