With Truth Social Having Trouble Attracting Users, Will Trump/Nunes Realize That There’s More To Managing A Social Media Site Than Grievances?

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.