Following the New York Times’s detailed profile of TikTok a few weeks ago, everyone who likes to stay even roughly current is wondering what the next great social media platform that they’ve never heard of will be. Fortunately, we at the Monkey Cage are on top of this one. On April 1, here are our top choices for breakout social media platform of 2019:
AOC: A social media platform that live-streams all of AOC’s other social media accounts. Not expected to be fully rolled out until 2024, it will be in Beto version for 2019-20.
BitWhat: The social network for reminiscing about how much money you were worth when the virtual currency you purchased — but the name of which you can’t quite remember now — was really worth a lot of money.
FaceOff: A social network for people who deleted their Facebook accounts to stay in touch with friends and family, post pictures, links, and status updates, and access news — all while still being able to tag their Instagram pix and WhatsApp chats with #DeleteFacebook.
MyParentsSpace: A social network designed for those younger than 18 to discuss how much cooler social media platforms they use are than the ones their parents use. Premium subscription for API becomes extremely popular with data scientists working for hedge funds who are trying to predict when to short Facebook’s stock.
NoMoAd: A new social network that promises not to take any ad money or charge subscription fees. How will it make money? Blockchain.
PayCoach: A fully encrypted payment network for parents of high school seniors and coaches of obscure sports at elite universities.
Readit: An anonymous social media platform for people who like to read books only in their paper format to talk crap about people who read books in electronic format. Readit will be broken down into separate “subreadits” for talking crap specifically about people who read books on mobile phones, tablets, Kindles, Amazon Fires, the Nook and this thing.
SchadenFeed: Listicles of bad things happening to people who used to be mean to you.
SlowGram: IRL platform to share pictures with friends and family directly to their residence. Originally named PostOffice before key summer 2019 rebranding.
SlapShot: Straight out of Ottawa, SlapShot allows the user to customize the front of a hockey puck with their favorite team logo (top right corner) hashtag (bottom right corner) food (lower left corner) and player number (upper left corner). You can then “shoot” the puck at up to five friends daily, who can choose to pass it back (swipe up), pass it forward to someone else (swipe down), block the shot (swipe left), or let the shooter know they’ve “scored” (swipe right). In a development absolutely no one could have foreseen, the platform quickly becomes more popular with singles than hockey fans.
Splutter: It’s like Twitter, but for people who are angry about things. (Facing potential lawsuit from Twitter for intellectual property infringement.)
YouSnooze: It’s like Twitch, but with videos of people watching C-SPAN.
Tip of the hat to my wife and kids, who spotted a number of these before I did.