"Trump’s biggest obstacle is time. He wants the media spotlight back immediately or back by the 2022 midterms, and he can’t build a real social platform by then."
Said Nu Wexler, a communications consultant (who's worked for Twitter, Facebook and Democratic campaigns), quoted in "Trump is sliding toward online irrelevance. His new blog isn’t helping. The former president’s aides said his new online presence would ‘redefine the game.’ But his heavily promoted blog is seeing few visitors" (WaPo).
Even if Trump could build a "real social platform"...
To keep people interested, a new social network would also need to overcome more established social media sites’ “network effects” — the fact that so many users’ friends and family are on there already, locking them in — and “engineer all the tricks that the other platforms use to drive engagement and virality, which is no easy feat,” said Ashkan Soltani, the former chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission.
“Those companies have had years and years of engineering and data and A-B testing of what evokes people writ large,” he added. “The way they are engineered to amplify divisive content; the way they use your friends and your friends’ activities to grab you; the way they use notifications to draw you back in — all those aspects aren’t going to be present in whatever thing Trump creates.”
The way they are engineered to amplify divisive content; the way they use your friends....
Yes, good thing Trump — who does know how to "evoke people" — can't cause a "real social platform" to come into existence for his personal/political use. It's bad enough that these generally available sites — the ones that all exclude Trump — are so vast and so highly functional. I would like to see Trump back on these places — Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even as he's "sliding toward online irrelevance," it's more worrisome that we're all sliding — greased by this social media (and the mainstream press) — into shallow recirculation of the divisive content and pointless attention grabbing.
