Makes me wonder how the inevitable advertising bubble bursting will impact a lot of these platforms, too. A lot of these exist only for advertising.
I’m gonna guess that you’re on the money for Facebook, though they will break Marketplace into its own service and probably maintain Messenger as well until eventually merging it into WhatsApp.
Reddit is going to get bought up. If they go public, they’ll be undervalued and cheap to buy given all of the controversy and instability among the userbase. If they stay private, they’ll continue enshittifying until costs exceed income and they have no choice but to seek a buyer. The thing about Reddit is that they are valuable and they know it, but they don’t have the ability to capitalize on that value with their business model. They are valuable as a training model for AI, and eventually some big company (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon maybe) will buy Reddit for cheap just to use their content as a training model. And potentially de-enshittify the site in the process when the revenue model becomes the content itself instead of the eyeballs consuming it. But I am assuming it will implode eventually once they have everything they need. The company that buys it will spin it off into some AI-driven platform that feeds you the content it knows you want to see and Reddit itself will be slowly phased out.
Agree YouTube will stay, but Google’s going to start forcing YouTube Premium more. If ad money dries up, I almost guarantee that they’ll impose restrictions or incentives (maybe a combination?) on monetizations for creators. If you make your videos publicly available, you get a miniscule cut and you’re capped at 1080p@30, 10 minutes or less or something like that. But if you make your videos YT Premium exclusive, you get a bigger piece of the pie and better quality/support. Google will up the price of Premium again but break out Music and Ad-Free into separate subscriptions that each cost marginally less than the two together cost today.