Sound Off Online (Meta)

The seed for this one was noticing that Spotify sounded like "what if I". After getting the themers together, I kept thinking I had done something similar to this before. Turns out I had, but it was 3 years ago (https://crosshare.org/crosswords/vFk2y0oeR0Uu3s1OKeFd/social-media-meta) and a sufficiently different mechanism, so I went ahead anyway. Hope you enjoyed it!

My first guess was Spotify because these all sounded like song titles. Second guess YouTube for the same reason. Then 4chan because of the comment about trolls. Finally the correct answer. Now that I'm reading the explanation, I kinda hear TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube, but I can't figure out They Shook It.

Third time was the charm! ("Retirement Brain" is real, folks. )

Woof -- took forever to see that. Thanks for the puzzle, Ben!

needed some help from the group solve, because I famously suck at sound-alikes

At first I took ALL the remaining letters: ET-DONT-IT-TREE and kept hearing something familiar, but could only come up with ANCESTRY… had to read the 4th nudge..

Well DAMN! I was sooo close, I had the ET DONT IT TREE and spend much of last night trying to sound out E-Dentistry (you can always find them by looking for their plaque on the wall), IDENTITREE (? geneology site). At one point I put "Popular Websites" into Google (since I use Facebook and a little YouTube only I thought that the missing one might be something I did not know about) and REDDIT came up to tell me what some were...how ironic is THAT. I never thought of use the first letters only. My only surprise was that there was not an entry With "In a grave manner" = SERIOUSLY.

Thanks for some interesting new website names Ben (ET DONUT TREE - our pastries are out of this world!) (EDEN TIT TREE - most popular birding site in paradise).....

Exactly what Berto said — was sounding out “et dont it tree” and only had maybe “ancestry” or “geometry” as bad guesses. Needed the last nudge to just take the first letters, and that was much more gettable. whew. I had spent a good bit of times looking for names in the themers (possibly FIDO? KIT? BET? are these nicknames??). I def didn’t pick up on the title hint to “sound” out these, and I’ve been tripped up by that before!

Not my fav, with pretty weak “rhymes” for me, but Mrs Lance enjoyed it. A good aha moment, but needed every bit of the nudges.

I got it only after the nudges. They shook = facebook was a bit of a stretch for me, but once I considered it, edit = reddit came quickly.

Finally!! Of course it wasn't helping that I missed the asterisks for 18A and 59A. When I finally saw them, the grid entry for 18A finally rang a bell as to what must be the "sounds like" site (once I realized I needed to be listening for a rhyming name, not a homophone - which was totally not working) and then I was able to find the site for 26A.

59A threw me for a bit because I first thought of Hulu, but when I realized that the four first letters had to be EDIT (because that rhymed with REDDIT) then I realized the site was YouTube. (I did backsolve for 46A because I couldn't figure out the "sounds like" site, but determined that "I" had to be the letter because I needed to purchase a vowel and that was the only one available). [I see in a comment below that the site for 46A is FaceBook.]