Trump Bans Himself From His Own Blog; Upset That Everyone Mocked Its Terrible Traffic
from the such-cancel-culture dept
It's been quite a month for the former President, Donald Trump, and his attempts to speak out. Almost a month ago, Trump launced a Twitter-like blog, with very limited interactive features, a silly terms of service (which said they could moderate whatever they wanted, like every other site). As we noted, lots of people mocked it for being just a standard old blog, but it did make the point that despite what other social media platforms might do, Trump was not being "censored." He had lots of ways to speak up. Of course, after a couple of weeks, reports noted that the site wasn't getting very much traffic, we highlighted that this showed what the issue really was: Trump wasn't upset about a lack of ability to speak. He was upset about the lack of a free audience.
As more and more reports came out about the dwindling traffic on the site, Trump (in standard Trump fashion) insisted that the site was actually getting huge traffic, even more than last year during the election:
“The Washington Post also incorrectly reported about my DonaldJTrump.com website viewership. We have not yet launched our own social media “platform,” but even the very basic site we have to post our statements has received 36.7 million views over the past month alone, and we’re getting more traffic to our website now than in 2020, an Election year! This number would be even greater if we were still on Twitter and Facebook, but since Big Tech has illegally banned me, tens of millions of our supporters have stopped using these platforms because they’ve become “boring” and nasty.”
Of course, even if that 36.7 million number is correct -- which it likely is -- most of that was probably on the day or two after launch when people came to check it out. All of the data suggests that the traffic was a one time deal and wasn't coming back:
“As a matter of metrics, audience, readers, every single way they measure blogs—it’s a failure,” with lower traffic than sites like Petfinder and Eat This, Not That, Melber said on The Beat with Ari Melber. Citing a report by the Washington Post, Melber noted that not one of Trump’s posts on the “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” site has gotten more than 15,000 interactions.
And now, following the bans from Twitter and Facebook, it appears that Donald Trump has banned himself from his own blog, shutting it down permanently. Trump and his spokespeople are claiming that this was part of "broader efforts" to have the former President engaged more directly with social media, and promised that details of these new efforts would be revealed soon.
Of course, the fact that they launched the blog with such hype, and talked it up so much less than a month ago, makes all of this seem (again, as per so much that is Trump) to be them just making shit up as they go along. Meanwhile, a Trump advisor admitted to the Washington Post that the reason it was shut down was that Trump was embarrassed by how little traffic it was getting and how everyone was mocking the site:
An adviser told The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey that the former president wanted to open a new “platform” and didn’t like that this platform was being mocked and had so few readers. The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about Trump’s plans.
Obviously, Trump has every right to kick himself off his own platform, just like every other website has every right to kick him off their platforms as well. I'm assuming we won't be seeing stories about Trump's "anti-conservative bias" though, huh?
In the meantime, all of this reinforces a few important things: (1) Trump has every ability to speak out if he wants to, but (2) that doesn't guarantee him an audience, and (3) building a successful website that gets traffic is hard work, and simply assuming that you can easily replicate a successful website and its audience is rarely going to work.
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Filed Under: audience, blog, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, social media
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Ah sweet schadenfreude...
Sets up a site where he can rant unchecked and stroke his ego from all the attention from his adoring cultists he was sure he'd get only to find out that now that he's out of office only a tiny fraction of people are interested in what he has to say, resulting in him throwing a tantrum and taking his ball home with him.
Other than providing a laugh I'd say this nicely undercuts any arguments that Trump should be allowed back on social media because without that he can't speak as he's shown that he can speak just fine what he can't get on his own is people to listen, and that latter bit is not in any way a right or something that he or anyone is owed.
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Another Trump business failure.
Better throw it in the pile...
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Re:
This one only lost money for one month! Great success! One of the best Trump ventures of all time!
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Re: Re:
Why lose money when you can just not pay contractors and employees?
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Re: Re: Re:
"Why lose money when you can just not pay contractors and employees?"
Yes, given his record I'm fairly sure the techs who built the blog for him may have been paid in his usual unimitable fashion.
I'm sure one of his grievances with the blog is that he may have been outraged that he'd actually have to pay running costs for it. There's probably a limit to how much money Vlad or his cult are willing to give him by now.
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Yep...
Trump Taj Mahal Atlantic City Casino - Bankrupt 1991
Trump Castle Hotel/Casino Atlantic City - Bankrupt 1992
Trump Plaza Atlantic City - Bankrupt 1992
Plaza Operating Partners Manhattan Hotel - Bankrupt 1992
Trump Casino Holdings Atlantic City - Bankrupt 2004
Trump Entertainment Resorts Atlantic City - Bankrupt 2009
Trump University - failed and fined. $25 million settlement for fraud against students ("I never settle!")
Trump Tower Tampa - failed
Trump Airlines - failed
Trump Marina - failed
Trump Magazine - failed
Trump Beverages - failed
GoTrump.com - failed
Trumpnet - failed
Trump Steaks - failed
Trump Vodka - failed
Trump Mortgage - failed
Trump Football team - failed team in a failed league (New Jersey Generals - USFL)
Trump Presidency - failing
Trump Fragrance - failed
Trump Coffee - failed
Trump Shoes - failed
Trump Home Mattresses - failed
Trump the Game - failed
Trump Ice - failed
Trump on the Oceans Resorts - failed
Trump Pillows - failed
Trump New Media - failed
Trump Ice spring water - failed
Trump International Hotel and Tower (Dubai) - failed
Trump tower Baku - In process of failure
Trump Org - Under investigation, Mammadov family/Darvishi family corruption, bank/tax fraud, flailing? failing?
Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point - failing ($122,000 in the red)
Trump Foundation - Forced dissolution, personal $2.8 million in restutituion/penalties, kids must take classes on eithics and running a charity.
Trump Model Management - failed
Trump presidency - failed
DonaldJTrump.com - newly failed!
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Re: Re:Trump bankruptcies
And you can read all about them in Chapter 11 of his upcoming autobiography.
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Re: Re:
There's more:
Trump Card - failed
The Apprentice - failed
The Celebrity Apprentice - failed
2020 Presidential Election - failed
Social media presence - failed
Not being called "Dump" - failed
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Re: Re: Re: Not exactly
To be fair - apparently he made a huge (yuuuuuge!!!) amount from the Apprentice programs, and basically he lost money bigly on his famous real estate ventures and the TV money kept him afloat for the previous decade or so before the election. (Along with lying to the banks to refinance his real estate holdings)
But nobody is putting Apprentice into reruns, and nobody makes any more of them, so I assume that gravy train has long since left the station. Media reports say he owes about $400M that he had to personally guarantee to get refinanced - all due in the next 4 years. I should buy a popcorn maker.
(Joke is that maybe Amazon bought MGM so Bezos could get his hands on Apprentice outtakes where The Slobfather says mean things about assorted genders, races and creeds.)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Not exactly
"...apparently he made a huge (yuuuuuge!!!) amount from the Apprentice programs..."
Apparently, so did his hairdresser. I mean, if we are to believe The Donald's tax returns a few sessions of getting your hair cut apparently runs to the tune of 70k USD. For being a master of The Deal he really isn't very good at getting a good price.
He's lucky his spendthrift lifestyle made sure this "multi-billionaire" got to pay zero in taxes for much of his career.
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Re: Re: Re:
"Not being called "Dump" - failed"
Meh, why bother making up silly nicknames when his name literally means "fart" in UK English?
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Re: Re:
Also failed - Trump Tower and Hotel in Toronto:
https://torontolife.com/real-estate/first-look-inside-toronto-trump-hotels-replacement-st-r egis/
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Re: pile, let's see
If Trump was to self-immolate hisself in a public place, with a little pre-notice to the press, I'd look for that on the www, and i bet a lot of people would. I could never find the energy to listen to G.W.Bush, Obama or Trump, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_self-immolations Hisself, a possessive, not objective pronoun
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I’m not going to laugh, I’m not going to laugh, I’m not going to laugh…
…aw, fuck it
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaha what a fucking chump 🤣
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Laugh all you want, fuzzball. We deserve it after what Trumpy inflicted upon us.
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Trump should sue himself for anti-Trump bias.
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You know after all of these years of mental anguish under the most anti-intellectual president of our time.
this is music to my ears.
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If you build it they will come...
is literally, a field of dreams...
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Pod People Reference
Evergreen MST3K Reference
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COVFEFE!!!
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I love the smell of COVFEFE in the morning.
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My family and I consider "covfefe" to be the greatest thing that Trump has given us all. Seriously, we abuse that word a LOT.
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"we’re getting more traffic to our website now than in 2020, an Election year!"
Didn't it just launch recently? How is that a valid claim if... you know what? I'm not the target audience for his obvious cons, I'm sure his voters are dumb enough to think this is a valid claim.
"Meanwhile, a Trump advisor admitted to the Washington Post that the reason it was shut down was that Trump was embarrassed by how little traffic it was getting and how everyone was mocking the site"
Of course. The man is obsessed with ratings, and has made a career out of shielding himself from criticism. He can't keep up the charade of being a vastly popular figure misrepresented by the media if he has access to the primary numbers.
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And this is why Conservatives want to block social media moderation, because if people actively have to put in effort to read what they have to say, they won't bother as there's little appetite for conservative victim complexes and racism among the general public. They want the retweets from elderly relatives you can't unfollow without family drama, they want armies of bots and broken algorithms signal boosting their every proclaimation, and they will scream until they get it and complete immunity from the rules of the platform that they agreed to follow when they signed up.
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He is such a child.
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Children are looking forward to a life of learning and improvement.
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Not all of them, obviously. Some of them reject adulting to such a degree they hit the age of 60+ in a chronic state of lathering outrage that daddy isn't there to bail them out anymore.
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"received 36.7 million views over the past month alone"
Am I the only one who has ever seen the "click farms" for free to play phone games where they have hundreds of phones in racks all doing things & moving the phone to look legit?
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Remember the "twitterbotcalypse" where right-whingers got all pissy that they lost most of their followers when Twitter got rid of 100% fake accounts?
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Re: Re:
blinks slowly
When are the right-wingers not pissy & whining?
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only thing you could get out of this.
Is that we should all be VOTING, not 60%.
WE should all get a choice of Who to Choose, insted of the .2%. Every election has about 1000 people running from around the country.
FREEDOM of info, Isnt free nor accessible. What did it take to get his school history? What does it take to get ANY politicians PUBLIC history?
NO PRIVATE DEBATES, demo and reps, NEED to stand out and tell us what they want and what they are going to do, and HOW.
I would still like to have an Evaluation process for all elected officials, but that will Never happen as long as the POLITICIANS have the power and NOT the people. 1 time per year a Grade system, showing all they did the past year. INCLUDING how much they spent int he congress bank(years ago, many got caught with OVER spending their Own accounts, upto $1 million over draft).
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Re: only thing you could get out of this.
School history isn't public. In fact, many colleges actually send out info packets to parents pointing out that student privacy means the university won't be able to provide updates on grades, or even confirm whether their child is actually enrolled in classes.
The best you can get is asking other students who knew them at school, or trying to find videos of graduation ceremonies floating around. The school can confirm whether existing records are legitimate in some cases, but can't provide you those records a priori.
Primary/secondary education is if anything even worse for publicity.
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Re: only thing you could get out of this.
I think it was Bill Clinton discussing the election in 2004 or 2008, who said basically - 40% of voters vote Dem, 40% vote GOP, and 20% change from year to year. the trick in any election is to persuade those 20%.
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Re: Re: only thing you could get out of this.
"the trick in any election is to persuade those 20%"
...and the issue is that although both party adherents will vote for their candidate, only one of those parties would end up selecting a grifter, white supremacist or Hitler wannabe for a candidate.
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Yeah, but how many views would the “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump’s Cow“ account get on Twitter? I’m betting more than 36.7 million.
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Not as much as Devin Nunes' cow, methinks…
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Or "moothinks" ?
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Of for fsck's sake...stop lowing about that cow already. You know by now it's just the republican cattle call.
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I'm assuming we won't be seeing stories about Trump's "anti-conservative bias" though, huh?
Not so sure about that, here. Surely this must be some kind of 'tech monopoly conspiracy' to divert what would be clicks to his website somewhere else, just to make him look foolish.
Otherwise he'd have to admit incompetence and a lack of public interest in what he has to say.
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< ... just to make him look foolish.
You can't be serious, implying that he needs help in that regard....
That was the entire point of TFA - he did just admit that very thing, by shutting down the site.
As Frank Zappa would've said: "Well, that's a few million electrons that don't have to be embarrassed by the message they're carrying."
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That was the entire point of TFA - he did just admit that very thing, by shutting down the site.
Well no, apparently the excuse he and his cultists are running with is that the blog was basically an experiment and part of a much larger, very real and sure to be super-duper successful plan down the line.
Trump and his spokespeople are claiming that this was part of "broader efforts" to have the former President engaged more directly with social media, and promised that details of these new efforts would be revealed soon.
I'm pretty sure he would sooner cut off a finger than admit that he failed at something as his ego simply couldn't accept it, so of course he has to spin this as just a part of something planned down the line. That said I do find the phrasing entertaining, 'engaged more directly with social media' is a funny way of saying 'desperately hope his cultists will cross-post his ramblings on a platform people actually use since he can't do so himself any longer.'
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Re: Re:
"Well no, apparently the excuse he and his cultists are running with is that the blog was basically an experiment and part of a much larger, very real and sure to be super-duper successful plan down the line."
And they are eating that steaming pile of bullshit as if it was candy floss because Dear Leader told them not to believe the testimony of their own lying eyes, nose and tongue.
It's seriously embarrassing. The US is setting historical records in having utter morons being a significant part of their voting citizenry.
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Re: Re:
Well no, apparently the excuse he and his cultists are running with is that the blog was basically an experiment and part of a much larger, very real and sure to be super-duper successful plan down the line.
Yep - so a dismal failure of a blog should be replaced with a better functional equivalent. I think you hit the nail on the head as to why so much of his shit has failed. He keeps repackaging shitty products.
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Yet more proof that Twitter et al. should have banned the lame duck whiner-in-chief way, way earlier.
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More like his lawyers trying to protect him...
from further incriminating himself.
I'm sure his site got shit traffic but it's the criminal investigation that caused him to shut the blog down. His lawyers need him to STFU. I can't imagine the stress trying to reason with that lunatic.
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If only Trump could also realize sooner other things at which he's lost... like the 2020 election, for example.
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