The year in platforms

Our 2021 predictions, revisited

Dec 16, 2021

2021 written in the sand before an approaching tide. (Engin Akyurt on Unsplash) — (Engin Akyurt on Unsplash)

As 2020 came to a close, I stopped here to ask some questions about what 2021 might have in store. “Will 2020 election denialists gather into a coherent and possibly violent movement?” I wondered. “Will citizen (or candidate) Donald Trump be banned from Twitter or another social network — and if so, why?”

Reader, they did, and he was. And the reason was both surprising (Trump incited an attack on his own government) and not (that attack was essentially under way when I asked the question). In any case, the traumatic, surprising, and hopeful events of 2021 both confirmed and challenged our assumption heading into this year. Today, let’s reflect on what we thought would happen, and then consider some of the events we didn’t see coming.

I. Predictions

Last year we got so many predictions right that, on balance, I think we were probably too conservative with our guesses. That said, here are some things that we thought would happen, and did. (The bolded lines here are verbatim predictions from last year.)

Social networks go crazy for commerce. Did they ever. It was the centerpiece of Snapchat’s partner summit in the spring. Meta made it a top company priority. YouTube tested live shopping, then Twitter did the same. It was all a no-brainer: Apple’s launch of App Tracking Transparency made it all the more urgent for platforms that rely primarily on advertising revenue to diversity their income.

Silicon Valley accelerates its investment in products and services for individual creators. This was another gimme. All year, Meta added products for creators across Facebook and Instagram; the company promised at least $1 billion in payouts. Twitter added tipping and launched Super Follows. YouTube announced it had hit 2 million paid creators. TikTok added tips and gifts for live streamers. Discord started testing paid access to servers.

Multiple ongoing lawsuits and proposed regulations — related to antitrust in the United States, and data privacy and competition in the European Union — will slow down big tech. Indeed they did, though perhaps not as much as critics hoped. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority proved to be one to watch, blocking Meta’s planned acquisition of the moribund search engine Giphy and later saying it would investigate Microsoft’s more consequential $16 billion takeover of AI speech recognition company Nuance. Lina Khan took over at the Federal Trade Commission, but to little effect so far. (The agency’s signature case against Facebook, filed under her predecessor, was tossed out in June; she has revised and refiled it. We’ll see.)

One notable trend here was the degree to which antitrust action took place outside the United States and Europe; one of the year’s most important antitrust decisions, related to in-app payments, came out of Korea. In any case, by mid-year, Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta faced at least 70 antitrust cases worldwide.

Their businesses, of course, are still as vibrant as ever.

Tech’s labor issues accelerate. Labor actions, walkouts, and even unionization hit the tech landscape medium-hard in 2021. Netflix walked out over Dave Chappelle; fearmongering-as-a-service app Citizen formed a union. That tech labor is a force to stay became clear this fall when Apple, which has historically ever only spoken with one unified corporate voice, saw a series of employees decry their working conditions — first on Slack, then on Twitter. Many of them later left the company and filed lawsuits, or reached quick settlements with their former employer.

And now some predictions we got less right, with bolded lines representing a slight re-working of the original predictions:

Remote work hasn’t quite reshaped the industry … yet. As best as I can tell, teams are still mostly operating as they did in the weeks that they first went into lockdown. And while there are plenty of new digital nomads on the road, their companies don’t seem to be making much different stuff as a result. (Possible exception: an accelerated focus on virtual reality.)

The internet did have a reckoning over porn. It started at the end of last year with an exposé on Pornhub. But the subsequent backlash was small, and mostly confined to OnlyFans, which briefly got out of and then got right back into the porn business. (I did ask last year what role OnlyFans would play in the backlash; that turned out to be the right question.)

Dating apps might have had a moment. But it wasn’t particularly big, at least from the standpoint of cultural impact. Also Tinder’s CEO quit. And I’m still single. So.

Audio apps did take their turn in the spotlight. But the spotlight came and went in a hurry. Now all that remains is for the Clubhouse co-founders to cash out and sell to an Indian company in 2022.

The United States did need a strategy for the regulation of Chinese apps. But we still don’t have one, despite adding lots more companies to an official blacklist. (As of today: DJI, the world’s biggest maker of drones.) But there’s no coherent plan for what to do about any potential threat that TikTok could create, for example.

Finally: the internet didn’t save movie theaters. At least, not the way some of us guessed. They still exist, but they’re not owned by a streaming company.

II. The surprises

One big thing we didn’t predict: 2021 turned out to be a year of incredible transition at some of the world’s biggest companies, and smaller ones that often feature around here. From the board room to the product road maps, 2021 saw changes that will reverberate for years to come. (If that sounds like typical year-end round-up hyperbole, I absolutely would not have said that about 2018, 2019, or 2020.)

Facebook led the pack. First, in a conversation with me this summer, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he intended to pivot the company to focus on building “the metaverse,” a term that was still then unknown to most people who don’t read science fiction. A few months later, Zuckerberg re-christened the company Meta. For the moment, this is mostly just a re-branding, with some light reorganizational elements to support it.

But there were two immediately important aspects of the move: one, it marked the moment that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp began their transition into legacy products after a decade at the top. And two, it led to a slew of other companies to say on earnings calls that they are also metaverse companies, and within a week or so of the rebrand the Twitter timeline was begging us all to stop saying “metaverse” already. (If nothing else, the move did seem to head off further conversations about the year’s other big Facebook story: Frances Haugen, the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, and the Facebook Papers.)

The Meta transition wasn’t the year’s first big change. Jeff Bezos stepped down from running Amazon after 27 years, leaving it to Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy. The traditionally tone-deaf company began to make some of the right noises about treating workers better, but spent the latter half of the year tripping over a series of crises: sustained charges of union busting; a controversy over drivers peeing in bottles; and just in the past week, a deadly tornado that revealed workers aren’t allowed to use their cell phones in the company’s warehouses. In June Amazon laid out its vision “to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work”; suffice to say the journey is only 1 percent finished.

Twitter got a new CEO, too, after Jack Dorsey stepped down amid apparent pressure from activist shareholders. That Dorsey might have to leave Twitter for real was apparent as early as last March, but the company’s near-miraculous year as a product organization — shipping product after product, from creator monetization to a premium subscription to a fully functional Clubhouse clone — obscured the existential threat he was under. In 2022, it will be up to Dorsey’s handpicked successor, CEO Parag Agrawal, to see that the revenue organization starts to perform as well as the product team.

Surely just as consequential, but surprisingly little remarked upon, is the fact that ByteDance got a new CEO as well. Zhang Yiming, who co-founded the company in 2012, got slightly ahead of a massive regulatory crackdown on consumer apps in China when he stepped down from his role in May. By November, he had left the board as well. TikTok has continued to thrive in the United States under his successor, Liang Rubo. But uncertainty around Beijing’s long-term tolerance of the consumer internet meant that what should have been TikTok’s proudest year to date has been marred by a sense that it could all end at any time, for almost any reason.

Google and YouTube proved to be islands of relative stability, even as they were buffeted by various lawsuits and regulatory issues. YouTube spent most of the year trying to figure out its own version of TikTok, which it calls Shorts; Shorts got a head start in India, thanks to TikTok being banned there, and now Shorts is humming along worldwide. (See also: Instagram Reels.) The usual content moderation and creator controversies abounded, but YouTube mostly shrugged them off. A move late in the year to get rid of public “dislike” counts struck a good summary note: putting on a happy public face, whatever dissatisfactions might be roiling beneath the surface.

Google spent much of the year fighting off labor issues, starting with its deeply unhappy team of ethical AI researchers and continuing with a group of fired internal organizers who have now won a series of victories at the National Labor Relations Board. It faced, along with Apple, a reckoning over its anticompetitive app store policies, and paid off various parking-ticket-sized fines. Google opened its first retail store. It proposed an alternative to tracking cookies that a lot of people hated. It watched support for its AMP standard for mobile pages fall apart after a lawsuit revealed that it was a cynical ploy to hoard digital advertising revenue.

Apple announced a major initiative to support child safety efforts, but consulted very few people about it, and the resulting backlash put those efforts mostly on ice. It won a series of pyrrhic victories in its effort to maintain total control over the App Store and in-app payments, but it now seems obvious that the company will have to allow alternative payments eventually — possibly next year. It will likely still be the very richest company in the world when that happens. The hardware was almost all still excellent, as usual: the M1 MacBook Pros, in particular, are among the company’s highest achievements to date.

Web3 went mainstream, though a lot of people still wish we wouldn’t call it that, or talk about it at all. Crypto was arguably the year’s biggest story from a venture capital and tech product perspective, though many mainstream publications could barely stop holding their noses long enough to cover it. First it was NFTs that captivated the world; then, thanks to an auctioned original copy of the Constitution, DAOs. Along the way, I wrote about some of the little green shoots that seemed interesting to me: an art project that turned into its own little universe of intellectual property; a video game that pays you to play it; a platform for royalties that makes an end run around the big music labels.

Snap stayed focused and built things. Spotify went all in on podcasts. Netflix went all in on merch. Group chats became the actual center of the cultural conversation, and the chats popped off across every messaging app all year.

Clubhouse withered, as did most of the other once-promising 2021 upstarts: Dispo, Poparazzi, Parler, Gettr. Zoom stabilized. Donald Trump promised, but has yet to deliver, a social network helmed by Devin Nunes. He is still banned on every major social network, and communicates mostly via press release and cable TV appearance.

I reported on the turmoil at Signal, and Medium, and Basecamp.

To sum up: we were right on many of the big trends, wrong on some of the details, and blissfully ignorant about the sea change that 2021 would bring. It has been my pleasure to bring you these stories and more this year; doing this work is the privilege of my career, and I thank you for supporting it with your attention and your subscriptions.

Tomorrow, we’ll make predictions for next year: send them my way if you have any to share. Until then, thanks for reading.

Governing

⭐ European Union lawmakers voted to pass the Digital Markets Act. Potentially quite a big deal. But: “Lawmakers will now have to reconcile their proposal with that of EU countries and the Commission next year before the draft rules can become law.” Here’s Foo Yun Chee in Reuters:

The Digital Markets Act (DMA), unveiled by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager last December, sets out a list of dos and don'ts for U.S. tech giants designated as online gatekeepers with fines up to 10% of global turnover for violations, a global first. […]
The lawmakers' proposal would also make it easier for users to switch default settings on their services and products to rivals.

A comprehensive review of every single instance of potential voter fraud in six battleground states in the 2020 election found just 475 dispute ballots, or 0.15 percent of Joe Biden’s margin of victory. Not that Big Lie believers will care, but worth noting nonetheless. (Christina A. Cassidy / Associated Press)

The United States will blacklist eight more Chinese manufacturers, including DJI, the world’s leading maker of drones, “for their alleged involvement in the surveillance of the Uyghur Muslim minority.” They will join 60 other companies currently on the list. (Demetri Sevastopulo and William Langley / Financial Times)

State-backed hackers from China, Iran, North Korea and Turkey appear to be exploiting the dangerous Log4j vulnerability. “Some attackers appear to be experimenting with the attack; others are trying to use it to break into online targets, Microsoft said.” (Robert McMillan and Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal)

Google told employees that they will eventually be fired for failing to comply with vaccine rules. It does seem like an elegant way of identifying and removing some of the company’s worst employees. (Jennifer Elias / CNBC)

Apple quietly removed all mentions of CSAM scanning from its child safety pages. But “plans for CSAM detection have not changed since September, which means CSAM detection is still coming in the future.” (Tim Hardwick / MacRumors)

Meta expanded its bug bounty program to include scraping. I’m extremely interested to see how this policy intersects with “good” scraping, of the sort done by journalists and academics. (Catalin Cimpanu / The Record)

Former Facebook researcher and a disinformation researcher discuss the recent election in Honduras. “I stood in front of Facebook officials at the Atlantic Council’s 360/Open Summit in London in 2019, asking them for important information for our work, like having access to CrowdTangle,” the Honduran researcher says here. “In the conference, in front of the community, they told me that yes, they’d share access to CrowdTangle with me, but then they ghosted me.” (Leo Schwartz / Rest of World)

The Los Angeles Police Department hired a Polish company to track mentions of “defund the police” online. Personally, I would defund that specific aspect of the police. (Sam Levin and Johana Bhuiyan / Guardian)

Uh oh, there’s already misinformation in the metaverse. The example here is from a no-name startup whose demo went awry, but the story digs into the vexing and very real challenges of policing a three-dimensional virtual space. (Jillian Deutsch, Naomi Nix, and Sarah Kopit / Bloomberg)

Industry

⭐ Amazon had another massive outage of Amazon Web Services. I’d call it the capper to a terrible week for the company after its tornado disaster, but still it’s only Wednesday. Here’s Richard Lawler at The Verge:

Amazon Web Services barely finished the postmortem on last week’s incident that interrupted deliveries and shut off feeds from security cameras before AWS started having problems again. While last week’s outage was in the US-EAST-1 region, reports around 10:45AM showed connections to the company’s US-West servers were failing. […]
There are also reports of disconnections for services like League of Legends, Valorant, DoorDash, Duo, and Slack, while gamers experienced disconnections and server issues across Nintendo Online, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network.

Apple delayed its planned return to the office indefinitely. Companies are finally no longer setting planned return dates, after moving them back countless times. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)

Zoom joined the industry’s leading counterterrorism group. With Zoom now part of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, Al Qaeda will once again have to use BlueJeans. (Elizabeth Culliford / Reuters)

Twitter is adding automated captions on its videos. A nice accessibility feature. (Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch)

People spent 15 hours roleplaying a McDonald’s drive-thru on Twitter Spaces. Clubhouse could never. (Kaitlin Hatton / The Verge)

Web3 is going just great. (Molly White)