With Truth Social Having Trouble Attracting Users, Will Trump/Nunes Realize That There’s More To Managing A Social Media Site Than Grievances?
from the that-would-require-the-ability-to-be-introspective dept
It appears that Donald Trump’s social network, at least in its initial form, is following the pattern of many of Donald Trump’s other business ventures: lots of hype, but little in the way of an actual business. As Politico has detailed, even the MAGA world isn’t exactly rushing to make Truth Social the Trumpist paradise he seemed to expect.
Approximately 313,000 people follow Trump on Truth Social — just a fraction of the more than 85 million who once followed him on Twitter. That could be due, in part, to a waitlist to get onto the site that is still hundreds of thousands of people long. But many major players in the conservative world also aren’t on the app. There are no verified accounts for Trump’s former advisers Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, although unverified accounts exist, based on a search Tuesday. While top conservative talk show host Dan Bongino has an account, Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson did not appear in the search.
Apparently the lackluster launch has made the big guy sad.
In recent weeks, sources have heard the former president on the phone swearing gratuitously and asking things like, “What the fuck is going on” with Truth Social.
He’s repeatedly groused about the negative press and the less-than-stellar optics of the rollout, these sources said. And he’s demanded to know why more people aren’t using it—why the app isn’t swiftly dominating the competition.
And it appears that Trump’s handpicked CEO, Devin Nunes, who literally quit Congress to take this job after whining about “censorship” on social media (while simultaneously suing people who made fun of him on social media), is having a bit of a rough go in his new job.
Now, obviously (as Nunes himself has emphasized), it’s still very much the early days of the platform, and things could get better. But the most bizarre thing to me is how many people seem to assume that building a successful social media site is somehow easy. Yet, now we’ve seen Gab, Parler, GETTR, and Truth Social (not to mention a number of other also rans and wannabes) all try to jump into the space pretending that they would magically recreate Twitter, but without the “censorship.”
Of course, that was always ridiculous, because every website needs to moderate, or it becomes a cesspool of spam and harassment. And each of these platforms learns pretty quickly the need for some level of moderation. Truth Social didn’t even start out pretending otherwise (even as its marketing pretended the site was somehow more supportive of “free speech” its terms of service made it clear that there will be aggressive moderation — something that has been shown to be true).
Part of the oddity in all of this is that Trump himself isn’t even really using Truth Social yet, apparently happier with the attention that his tweet-like press releases have been getting him (and I won’t even get into the interestingly timed announcement, just a couple weeks before the launch of Truth Social, that Melania Trump would make Parler her main social media site.)
All of that is to say that some of us have been pointing out for years that there’s a lot more to building a successful internet company than the idea or publicity. Execution matters, and mere grievances are not execution. And, sometimes, part of that execution is figuring out how to make your site into the kind of place people actually want to visit. And, sometimes, that means banning trolls, assholes, and hate mongers… rather than pretending that’s what makes a site useful.
So much of what the Twitters, Facebooks, and YouTubes of the world spent over a decade learning was how to create ecosystems that people want to use. The anger-fueled replacement efforts seemed to think that it was all easy, and that doing the slightest bit of community management went against the ethos of social media. So far, the reality is looking like the opposite is true. To make social media work, you have to make it social and welcoming. That’s not something that Donald Trump has much experience in doing.
Filed Under: content moderation, devin nunes, donald trump, social media
Companies: truth social
Comments on “With Truth Social Having Trouble Attracting Users, Will Trump/Nunes Realize That There’s More To Managing A Social Media Site Than Grievances?”
That becomes a problem when trolls, assholes and hate mongers are your primary target demographic. That type absolutely hates it when they’re the overwhelming majority, because then they have no targets to go after and with no targets the site’s no fun for them. There is no solution to this that’d be acceptable to Trump and his supporters.
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Has he tried looking in a mirror?
He’s repeatedly groused about the negative press and the less-than-stellar optics of the rollout, these sources said. And he’s demanded to know why more people aren’t using it—why the app isn’t swiftly dominating the competition.
Because not even his cultists want to make their primary social media platform one where the only people using it are people like them and those trolling them/exposing their hypocrisy.
It’s one thing for them to take a dump in someone else’s livingroom and let someone else clean up the mess but when it’s their livingroom and everyone is dropping their pants it’s much less entertaining for them.
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It might not even be that. I’ve read on other forums stories that the waiting list to join is over 1 million. It’s depressing that so many are eager to be grifted, but not necessarily unexpected given how many people voted for him.
In that case, the blame is also squarely at his feet – since, yet again, Trump has not attracted the best and the brightest, but sycophants who had no previous experience in the area and no real qualifications apart from fealty to Trump.
His audience is naturally limited, but if the people he hired to do the job are incapable of dealing with the demand that already exists, that’s also on him.
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That there is a waiting list is very probably a large issue irrespective of anything else. That there is still a waiting list must be compounding that issue.
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His audience is naturally limited, but if the people he hired to do the job are incapable of dealing with the demand that already exists, that’s also on him.
It doesn’t matter if there’s anyone competent running the show. That’s the hallmark of Trump’s entire business empire. Do ‘stuff,’ fail miserably, and blame someone else.
They’ve tapped into the stupidest Americans, who are more than willing to part ways with their money because of their perpetual victimhood coupled with a belief that a billionaire needs it.
This one will be no different. I give it 3 months, and it goes the way of the dodo – for no other reason than a finite number of assholes who will eventually realize all they have to argue with is each other.
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“Do ‘stuff,’ fail miserably, and blame someone else”
…while grifting as much as possible in the meantime. His entire business plan for everything he’s done, up to and including the presidency, is to make everything about him on the way up, and then leave others with the mess as he leaves with as much as he could fit in his pockets on the way down. A shame so many people keep falling for this nakedly obvious and often repeated con trick, but it has been said that nobody went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
No Censorship!
Well that DOES describe that orange clown.
Maybe change that “and” to an “or” to include more people? 😉
E
Consider Truth Social a very expensive educational opportunity, to learn the dynamics of modern social media applications.
Big OOF energy here.
Nothing highlights the failure of this service better than Trump not even using the damn thing after its launch. When even the quintessential con man can’t be bothered to use his latest grift, you know that shit is in trouble.
So much Dunning–Kruger
He doesn’t even realize how pointless that demand is. He’ll never accept the answer. He’ll only accept a lie. Anyone that works for him will that tells him the truth will be fired on the spot. Everyone else that doesn’t work for him will be ignored.
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I’ve seen toddlers with more patience than Donald Trump.
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“He doesn’t even realize how pointless that demand is. He’ll never accept the answer.”
Yep, the problem isn’t the question. It’s that the answers that deal with reality – the website is under high load that the inexperienced team who assembled off the shelf components are ill-equipped to deal with, but that doesn’t really matter in the long run because his brand is so toxic it can never come close to reaching the size of the competition – are not ones that he would ever listen to.
The latter is the real problem – even if every Trump voter signed up and you got the same number again somehow from an international audience, you’d still have less than 1/10 of Facebook’s current active daily user base, and given how toxic Trump and his cultists are, that’s probably close to a hard ceiling unless the site distanced itself from him and pivoted to find a more mainstream niche.
But, I somehow doubt that “you and the people who love you are the reason you will never succeed here” is something that will be understood by him.
Re: Re: You are applying the wrong standards
It’s only a minority of people who’d be having fun at Nazi rallies either. But the purpose of Nazi rallies is not to gather a wide range of people enjoying themselves and buying merchandise.
It is to curate a weapon for insurrection. Keeping sane people out is a feature, not a bug.
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There’s 2 viewpoints here really, the public and private one.
The public one is the one I was addressing, and while they want to put that face on it, the fact is that their stated aim of “dominating the competition” isn’t really viable.
The private one may be different, but we can only speculate based on their track record. Maybe it’s means to be a breeding ground for the cultists to forment another insurrection. Maybe it’s just something that was intended to be flipped and sold to someone else while the iron was hot, and not really act as a going concern (which would explain the poor ability for it to cope with the launch and recover after).
But, this is all speculation, so I’m preferring to stick with the way their failing their publicly stated mission rather than second-guessing the type of thing being planned behind the scenes. I know there’s something but I can’t deal with it until it rears its ugly head in public, since there’s no way in hell I’m going to try and experience it first hand.
Re: Re: Re:2
Well, for which of the two endeavors would you hire Devin Nunes of all people as CEO?
Re: Re: Re:3
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think the intention behind the scenes is fairly clear, and the hiring of the grapefruit and cow lover as the head pretty much confirms some of it. But, there’s enough verifiable concrete stuff to deal with in public without inspiring the cult’s persecution complexes with easy to believe, but not directly provable, theories.
Theres probably a limited amount of people who want to use a social media service thats full of extreme Conservatives gritters and trolls or people pushing fake news
Conservatives are on twitter and Facebook because they want to be connected to followers and a potential network of millions not just a small niche group
Maybe theres simply a limited no of social media apps that people will use
Survey says no
Because grievances are all they know.
So weird, he was just right here.
Hey K-dawg! Here’s you chance to redeem yourself bro!
Trumpio, featuring D. N
Where are all the MAGA-ites?
Why aren’t they on Trumpist’s Paradise?
Truth Social’s for their type
An Uncensored Social Media Site
That becomes a problem when trolls, assholes and hate mongers are your primary target demographic. That type absolutely hates it when they’re the overwhelming majority, because then they have no targets to go after and with no targets the site’s no fun for them. There is no solution to this that’d be acceptable to Trump and his supporters.
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One can always hope they will feed on themselves.
We’ve seen some Trump faithful turning on others for not being faithful enough to the lies.
In the cesspool they exist in, it won’t take much to trigger a purge to see who can be the most favored acolytes.
IIRC MTG declared war on one of the Trumpian inner circle lawyers.
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One can always hope they will feed on themselves.
Well, personal responsibility and all…
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See also: the “Worst People” Problem.
It’s almost like the thousands of inventors that Hamilton claimed were supposedly maligned by Techdirt don’t exist or something. You guys think he might have been lying?
“Will Trump/Nunes Realize That There’s More To Managing A Social Media Site Than Grievances?”
Implies a level of self awareness known to be extinct in this genus of grifter.
Well, the basic problem is that “grievances” are all these new networks have. They’re not filling any natural niche in the market as Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. have done. Their entire existence is based on oppositional defiance.
This is a problem on both ends. One, as noted here, is that some of which they’re opposing is how things actually need to work. No matter how hard they scream and stamp their feet, reality remains as it is and they have to deal with that.
The second is that this automatically limits their audience. People who aren’t being kicked off other social media platforms are not going to be attracted to the places where the people who have been congregate. They might be happy that those places exist to pick up the slack and provide evidence that there’s competition in the space, but there’s a hard ceiling as to how far they can grow. Prava (sorry, “Truth”) might be getting a lot of attention about it being the Trump place (even though Trump’s not there), but that’s more of a warning to avoid for many people, not a reason to sign up.
Maybe one of these services will pass the toddler tantrum and teen rebellion stages and provide a grown-up reason for the majority to be interested in going there. Bt, until then, we’re just going to see them attempting to learn the hard truth over and over again – that in the real adult world, some of the things you don’t like are actually needed.
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They’d have to offer something of value first. None of these grievance factories can offer anything that other social media services don’t already have.
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Yep, that’s really my point. All they have as selling points are Trump and “free speech”. But, Trump himself is a warning to keep away for a great many people, and the people having problems with their “free speech” were generally those with very good reasons for that problem through their own actions. So, until they have something else to offer, they essentially have a hard ceiling to how many people they could possibly attract in the long term.
Not that it matters if they’re incapable of actually serving the people who are already in the signup queue, but assuming they get those issues sorted out and the community doesn’t immediately devolve into a toxic sludge of hatred and grifting, they will have to come up with a unique selling point. FB succeeded because it was a very easy to use and clean interface compared to MySpace and other early platforms, certainly in the early days, then retained users through momentum. Instagram was all about sharing photos, Twitter was short-form messaging, Tik Tok short form videos, Snapchat was the temporary nature of the messages, Pinterest was more general image and hobbyist interest sharing, LinkedIn was the business rather than personal social focus… The successful social media service tend to have a hook to attract people, which is why many people use multiple services at the same time.
So, what’s the new hook that these guys can develop to attract new users? If all they have is “the assholes you’re glad were kicked out of other communities are here!” isn’t going to cut it, even among the people who liked the assholes but still prefer to use the benefits of the other platforms if they haven’t been kicked out themselves.
They have to come up with something else, but I fear that these are the people who think they’re guaranteed an audience just because they put something out rather than because there’s any actual reason for people to go there, and they’re going to find out the hard way, yet again, that the free market they claim to favour doesn’t look kindly on those who can’t compete.
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Furthering that feature discussion: Since Truth Social is built on Mastodon, it can only offer everything Masto instances already offer, but with a different userbase. (By and large, the Fediverse is queer-friendly and definitely unwelcoming to the kinds of people who would use T.S.) And Twitter is catching up with that functionality too, given how it now has per-post “sensitive content” settings. Hell, T.S disabled federation out of the gate, so now it can’t even federate with the right-wing shitpits that would’ve done so.
T.S has nothing but Trump to offer as a selling point. And since he has apparently refused to use the service since its launch…well, that says it all.
Re: Re: Re:2
Well, really it’s the same grift with Trump being the only major differentiator between his Pravda and all the other attempts. The cult have been told it’s those mean liberals at Big Tech that’s causing them problems and not the natural results of their own hateful stupidity, so use the “real American”, “free speech” platforms instead at a low low cost of whatever can be shaken from your pockets!
The silver lining here is that this parade of failures only serves to weaken the case against the “Big Tech” companies. A couple of years ago it seemed that there would be a real case to damage free association if the right people were convinced of the fiction that each social network was its own monopoly with no overlap. But, as there’s numerous competitors appearing all the time and they’re eventually forced to install the same kind of moderation or collapse due to the issues of not doing so, hopefully there’s a stronger case that there’s problems other than Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok all deciding that hatred is bad for business.
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Maybe one of these services will pass the toddler tantrum and teen rebellion stages and provide a grown-up reason for the majority to be interested in going there.
The ‘problem’ they face is that if they ever do that they’ll have alienated their target audience by maturing past them. All they have is ‘come to our place, you can throw all the tantrums you like as long as it’s not aimed at us’ so if they toss that aside then they’ll have removed their single ‘selling point’ and those that can will shift their primary platform back to one of the others.
When your target audience are the people who aren’t welcome elsewhere you’ve painted yourself into a corner as far as what you can offer and severely limited your potential audience from the very start, so as long as that’s the kind of people they’re trying to attract they can’t really do anything to ‘fix’ that.
You are not seeing the forest for the trees
Please remember: when there are no membership dues, the members are the ware.
It’s a feature, not a bug, that “Truth Central” is constituted of bored grievance airers. That makes it suck as a platform for getting advertising dollars.
But Trump got dollars enough at his disposal: he has other grifts for that.
He is curating a grievance mob in the strength of hundreds of thousands of people.
What do you think will happen when he calls for storming the Capitol next time? Pardons all round, because the mob members are treated so unfairly.
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But there are membership dues. T.S requires people to pay a monthly fee for the right to use the service.
He’ll be showing off the hypocrisy of T.S’s terms of service, which bars that kind of speech but will ultimately never apply to him.
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Frankly, if you consider “but this would be hypocritical” a viable defense against Trump, the hole you’ve been living in is likely a geothermic treasure.
Re: Re: Paying for Free Speech
Interestingly enough, snopes says otherwise. There was another ``free speech” vendor charging so much per week, and using pictures of Trump, but it was not truth social.
(preview still borkne)
Is the imaginary twitter cow a member yet?
Well….?
Call me cynical
He knew this would fail, as did all his cronies. It’s all a stunt setting up yet another cultural grievance.
His blog failed quickly; his platform will get about a year before shutting down, right before he steps away to ‘focus on his political future’ or some shit.
Then this becomes the topic of the 2024 election cycle: break up big Tech giants because competition is “clearly” impossible. All his sycophants fall in line, and this is the major plank of the GOP strategy for the next 6-8 years.
“Will Trump/Nunes Realize That There’s More To Managing A Social Media Site Than Grievances?”
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines seems highly likely to end up applying here…
Donald Trump, managing?
He’s not a manager, he’s a mascot. This is the equivalent of Trump Steaks or Trump University. He’s lending his name to a product and expecting to make money out of the deal.
I see two pictures:
It was incorrectly named. Should simply be called douchebags.
Wrong
This article is wrong. There is over 1.5million person waitlist when you sub for the app. You create a username and then wait for access bc the app is overloaded with people downloading.
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Oh you sweet summer child.
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So your argument is a combination of “the app isn’t built to handle that many people” or “there’s only a waitlist of 1.5 million people”… on an app that was widely touted by its supporters and developers to be the next Facebook, and carve out a sizeable user base out of the people who they claim Facebook is no longer serving.
Fam, neither of those arguments make Truth Social look even remotely good. At worst it means you didn’t plan for it. At best it means “1.5 million” ghosts is the best that you have.
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Which only raises the questions as to why they’re incapable of dealing with such a relatively small level of demand, and if they were predicting this level of demand why are they unable to cope?
1.5 million is tiny compared to the daily number of new users many of the other social networks dealt with while growing, and those were services dealing with completely uncharted waters, whereas Truth is based on an off-the-shelf product with known resource requirements for numbers of users.
Having a queue to access to technically better than all active users experiencing outages due to lack of resources, but if it takes more than a day or two to deal with the influx, there’s a different problem. Certainly not something you’d expect to see from a service that’s trying to boast that it’s a strong competitor to services that have 1-2 billion active users.
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More likely it’s spambots like the majority of right-wing twitter follower accounts.
Re: Wait list for trump social
This wait list is absolute proof that Nunes and Trump are incompetent and can’t hire anyone who is competent. A wait list for a social media site ??? That never existed till now. No other company is so incompetent that they could have this absurd wait list. 1 million names eh ? Facebook could clear the list in 1 day, truth social never will. TRULY INCOMPETENT