Why Has Trump’s Social-Media App Flopped?
Truth Social looks like a failure. Maybe that’s because echo chambers are boring.
In among the least surprising pieces of news ever, Donald Trump’s social-media app Truth Social is turning out to be a huge flop. The site, which wants to be a conservative version of Twitter (which booted Trump from its site after the riot at the Capitol on January 6), debuted a little more than a month ago, but downloads of its app at the Apple Store have plummeted to an estimated 60,000 a week, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower. Though there’s supposedly a waitlist with a million names on it, the site itself, according to Forbes columnist John Brandon, looks like the proverbial “ghost town.” Donald Trump, Jr. is assiduously posting away on the site. But it feels like he’s mostly yelling into the void.
To be fair, creating a new social media site from whole cloth is a major challenge. Social-media companies benefit from network effects, so that the more users a site has, the more attractive it becomes others. That it makes it hard to dislodge existing players, since the simple fact that they have lots of users makes people want to stick around.
But the argument for Truth Social was that it could solve this problem because it had a ready-made core audience in the form of…
