Trump's Truth Social tops downloads on Apple App Store; many waitlisted
reuters.com
reuters.com
With that said I think some people here might be too quick to dismiss the market opportunity a new social network could take advantage of.
You'll frequently see messages here about how terrible Reddit has gotten, in part because of heavy-handed moderation.
A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
Again, I doubt this particular app will succeed but I also wouldn't be surprised if the demand was real.
And then they will face the same market forces as Facebook and Reddit, and be forced to either capitulate or remain a tiny niche. Which may sound fine to a programmer, but anyone investing serious money into this will force their hand. And then the cycle repeats.
I also have a hard time believing he would invest a single a penny of his own money into this. He's a repulsive human being, but he's not an idiot. And his investors will be calling the shots.
I agree there is demand for a non-moderated social network, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it. From their own term's of service:
> users may not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
Doesn't this already exist in the form of Gab? I think they don't remove content except NSFW/pronography, doxing, and violations of US law.
I doubt this is necessarily true. Modern social media is complex engineering specifically because of the demands of the Panopticon department for determining your users' underwear color for your advertisers.
If your software is for political community and/or propaganda purposes and not for the benefit of advertisers, I'd bet anything that your technical complexity drops by an absolutely enormous factor. You're CRUDing text, images, and social graph data, maybe you're storing videos in an s3 bucket. And you're probably doing some basic sharding and caching.
A reasonable pitch to users. But to advertisers and others? Not so much.
If you create a social platform that appeals very strongly to a small minority but where the content creates strong objection in a larger group, then companies don’t want to be seen there. And running a social media platform is expensive. User demand isn’t what I’d worry about, it’s sales (of ads and paid subscriptions). I don’t think there is a market for either of those if Parler/Gab were any indication.
Why would you need advertising or even make money in the traditional sense for that matter? We have seen how social media companies have entered into overt political actions to control narratives. Trump is attempting to build his own version of this. And it's still early but he's not doing a bad job so far, he's raking in tons of money from investors. These "investors" aren't looking to make money, they are investing in political influence similar to those people who were pumping billions into the Clinton foundation to buy access/influence.
You don't. But running these operations at scale is extremely expensive, so you need a lot of income. It's possible to run it as a money sink provided you e.g. have investor money or, as in the case of previous right wing attempts, "donor money". But regardless of how the money is raised, it's rarely a charity that can go on forever. Everything we have seen so far indicates this isn't really a viable investment. Gab, Parler and similar have exactly this business model: operate at a loss through donor money. The audience isn't nearly big enough to motivate the spend, and the cost scales linearly with the audience unless there is a big ad income. The question shouldn't be why this should fail, but what sets it apart from Gab and Parler, other than "This time it's Trump".
Seems like false scarcity. Or a beta test.
What incentives could Apple possibly have for helping this firm?
It sounded like the Apple App Store was wait-listing downloaders.
Regardless of your political opinions it is undeniable that advertising could associate you with some unpleasantness and while there are brands willing to do so, they have already seen business reputational damage by doing so.
They could try charging users directly, but that has struggled historically (particularly for social networks wherein the network effect is a key success metric).
However, there is also a possibility that they are specifically looking for advertisers who are unabashedly conservative/on the right. I can easily see businesses branding themselves as the conservative alternative to [xyz]. A great example is MyPillow and Black Rifle Coffee. (Although B.R.C. has fallen out of favor lately).
IMO you would be doing less damage to society if you worked in the Military Industrial Complex, at least you were being honest about what you're working on.
The worst thing about it is the people behind these platforms know exactly what their products are doing and they profit from it.
The problem is it allows people/organizations "to do what people do at scale" with light or no consequences. And they make it very easy for people to do it and to get hooked on it.
That argument has the same flaw as the National Rifle Association's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Guns don't kill people. I kill people. With guns.
Previously, the social network playbook has been to try to capture as much of the population as possible, but I’m sure that Trump knows a large chunk of the population will never support or join the platform.
Also, power seems to fracture almost indefinitely. Trump went after fellow Republicans. I’m sure there will be similar fights to become the voice du jour of Truth Social.
This lady is quite famous in the UK and is banned from Twitter for her not so extreme views:
That billboard wasn't taken down by twitter (it was probably taken down by the advertising agency, who generally prefer not to be involved in that sort of thing once it's pointed out to them). And the person in question _does_ appear to have an active twitter account?
- GDR: German Democratic Republic (ie East Germany). Totalitarian state.
- PRC: People's Republic of China. Also autocratic.
- DPRK: Democratic People's Republic of Korea (ie North Korea). This one is a two-fer and definitely a brutal dictatorship.
With all that being said, I present to you "Truth Social".
It's not this. It's that the names are ironic: - GDR: German Democratic Republic (ie East Germany). Totalitarian state.
- PRC: People's Republic of China. Also autocratic.
- DPRK: Democratic People's Republic of Korea (ie North Korea). This one is a two-fer and definitely a brutal dictatorship.
- Truth Social
And so the above poster's point was that this is also ironic:
- CNN, "The Most Trusted Name In News."
Or maybe that was the WWE, who can tell them apart.
Fortnite,
tons of things depicting Pepe the Frog,
I presume they've made the same mistake as that other one did, building on centralized infrastructure so they'll probably end up getting banned from AWS too.
There is literally zero upside in taking preemptive action here.