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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

The best thing we can do is just pretend the network doesn’t exist. Ignore it and it won’t be news. Don’t feed the beast.

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I tried to search for Trump's account. It's really difficult to find it with any search engine. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu all failed to turn it up. I had to use "site:truthsocial.com Trump" on Google and even then it was nowhere near top result.

How hard can it be to get your most popular user into any search engine?

"How hard can it be to get your most popular user into any search engine?" Is it a telling find that something you'd expect to be easier to find, isn't? Who is really banning whom.

Yandex and Baidu don't find it either.

I think the problem is the media are not linking to it, not even conservative media. When no one cares about what you're saying enough to link to it, search engines don't assign importance to it.

Claims need evidence. After VPNing because apparently foreigners (or Americans living in foreign countries) can't handle the truth, I checked their robots.txt[1]:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

But "Oh no, the dirty woke leftie search engines are banning us!"...

Since we all know it's Trump little website/he'd be the most famous user (is he even still there?) I'd expect his profile is linked from the homepage, but that's not the case either...

[1] https://truthsocial.com/robots.txt

Very hard when the search engines are configured to derank you

Of course, you have no idea if that's true, but you say it because you want to believe it. This is textbook Frankfurtian bullshit.

What we do know:

1. Yandex and Baidu can't find it either. Russian and Chinese search engines have no incentive to derank Trump - if anything, the opposite (he's great for sowing division among Americans and it would boost the tech bias narrative).

2. As another commenter has noted, Truth Social bans all robots, including search engine web crawlers.

https://truthsocial.com/robots.txt

Truth Social literally asks search engines not to rank them.

I believe they announced they were invite only (at least initially) and blocking search engines from crawling. So it's intentional.

The reason is this:

https://truthsocial.com/robots.txt

     User-agent: *
     Disallow: /

There is nothing fishy going on.

Is the "we" who doesn't like Trump, a better class of humans than the "we" who does like Trump?

Yes

"We" are the people who don't exhibit cult-like reverence to leaders - irrespective of party affiliation. There is no better. There's only people with eyes wide-open or eyes wide-shut. I'm an independent and I have many liberal and conservative views/opinions. That means I get to choose between the lesser of two evils (in my opinion) without any allegiance to (or illusions about) the party the candidates are affiliated with. I know I'm getting a mixed bag no matter who I vote for. Clinging to a cult of personality or party makes us worse off.

We need to stop identifying as democrats or republicans and be Americans first. There's no compromise in Congress because it works out better for the parties, not better for Americans.

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