I joined CH in January, and I initially felt the same sense of excitement I felt when I first joined Twitter in early 2008 and started connecting with new, likeminded people.
But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspiring.
I was listening to the Good Time Show last week with CH co-founder Paul Davison talking about opening up to all comers, and I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing, therefore more people will use a talk-based app. I've heard others make this claim before, and it's always struck me as a deeply flawed thesis.
Sure, most people are comfortable spending plenty of time chatting with one person or a small group of trusted people, but far fewer people are comfortable talking in a large group of strangers.
The confidence threshold is much much lower for text and photo-based platforms, as you have time to craft your content and you can always (where supported) edit or just delete post if you have second thoughts.
But public talk-based platforms trigger all the same fear-reactions that live public speaking triggers, so far fewer people are comfortable doing it, and hence we get exactly what we see – a platform dominated by a relatively small number of outlier extraverts/confident speakers.
I keep thinking: Andreessen Horowitz aren't stupid investors, they must have thought of this and must be working with the founders to develop ways to keep growing user numbers and engagement. But I'm yet to see any signs this is the case, and more and more it feels like everyone has bought into this flawed thesis, and that we're witnessing a giant naked emperor scenario.
> I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing
Finding people that talk about stuff is one thing, finding people who like to listen to other people talking is the other. Unfortunately, listening has much higher friction than reading.
>Unfortunately, listening has much higher friction than reading.
Sure, for a minority of consumers like yourself.
However, for most people that make up the mass audience... they do not like to read long-form text whether it is articles in Vanity Fair, The Atlantic or books.
Yes, people would rather read the text of a temperature and weather forecast on their smartphone -- instead of listen to a long-winded presentation by a tv news meteorologist. But when we compare apples-to-apples of long-form high word count type of content, an audio medium for listening is preferred by mass consumers.
Most would prefer hearing Joe Rogan and his guest speak rather than reading 50000+ word transcripts of a 3 hour conversation. Likewise, talk radio is very popular and has higher audience counts than the circulation numbers of long-form magazines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...
Also, reading has its own "frictions" because text is missing tonal inflection, length of pauses, deadpan vs incredulous delivery, etc.
So how does clubhouse change the game? We already have youtube and podcasts. You can listen to Joe Rogan over bluetooth in your car. You can even ask Siri to play it. What is clubhouse doing that makes it easier to access or produce high word count content in audio form? How is clubhouse helping creators monetize their content? Why would I go to clubhouse instead of patreon for the type of content you describe?
From what I can see, podcasts vs Clubhouse is a bit like Youtube (without streaming) vs Twitch. One is more spontaneous and interactive whereas the other is consuming content.
I'm guessing it's the sense that users get to participate as well (probably more than a normal stream or Twitch stream) which interests people, the value proposition is being able to contribute to a Joe Rogan podcast as a roundtable discussion instead of just listening to it.
Not a clubhouse expert but it seems clubhouse is better for “spontaneous” conversations/talks, as in I don’t have to upload it as a podcast perhaps do post-processing etc to get my content out.
It also allows you to promote your audience to speakers so it’s more of an interactive podcasts, so you can actually ask questions to a panel or the speaker.
Again, haven’t used it much but this is what I understand Clubhouse brings to the table.
> as in I don’t have to upload it as a podcast perhaps do post-processing etc to get my content out
That sounds like shirking the responsibility of not wasting the listener's time, i.e. lowering the barrier to production at the cost of raising the friction of consumption. For the app to be popular to use — rather than just popular to publish on — wouldn't you want the opposite?
Or, to put that another way: wouldn't "an edited recording of a talk recorded on Clubhouse, posted to YouTube" become a more popular way to consume Clubhouse content, than actually going on Clubhouse? And would this not kill any hope Clubhouse would have of ever monetizing, since there would be no users on the app itself to ever show ads to?
(I think this is truly the thing that really did "kill" Vine, in the end: there was no reason for most people — who are not, themselves, performers — to engage with Vines on Vine, when they could just engage with Vine compilations on YouTube. The creators saw the writing on the wall and sold it. TikTok came up with a better model, "democratizing" Vine's professionally-produced-funny-6-second-clip model into the much more widely-engaged-with "clip of a pretty person being silly with platform-licensed music in the background" model.)
> That sounds like shirking the responsibility of not wasting the listener's time
This is why I don't consume podcasts. If it's worth saying, then it's worth making a transcript, which I can skim (or top-and-tail) in a tenth of the time it takes to listen to the whole thing.
Popehat was a blog that I used to visit regularly. Then Ken decided he was too busy to write, and most of his content is now some unscripted podcast - the blog now gets maybe a couple of posts a year, apart from the links to his podcasts.
Sure but the argument in the comment I was responding to was “look at all this long-form produced spoken content, clubhouse can tap that”. I don't experience much (any) spontaneous short form spoken content on the internet. The interactive element is interesting if that can somehow become relevant.
Part of the idea was that it would be more authentic and kinder. When people are completely anonymized they are free to be their worst selves. Your voice is personal. Its slower though because its more 'single threaded' for lack of a better term, than a reddit sub.
> Part of the idea was that it would be more authentic and kinder.
Did that work out? All I know about clubhouse in this regard is stuff you you can find at google searches for e.g. "clubhouse misogynist", "clubhouse racist", "clubhouse anti-semitic"
I have never been there, and part of the reason is the reputation that it has from afar be being the opposite of "kind".
Wikipedia entry for "Clubhouse (app)" says as much in para 2.
Maybe, being not anonymous isn't a cure-all for bad behaviour. After all, there were racists before they could be anonymous online.
>What is clubhouse doing that makes it easier to access or produce high word count content in audio form? How is clubhouse helping creators
I'm not sure there's an exact parallel of "creator" in the Clubhouse paradigm. I'm not a Clubhouse user so my info is 2nd-hand based on how others describe it but this is my understanding of its original differentiation from podcast platforms and Youtube.
Consider the scenario of:
- Interesting Person A is not a podcast host or content producer. Person A also does not write text articles and opinion pieces in magazines or newspapers.
- Interesting Person B is also not a podcast producer.
- Person A and Person B can talk to each other in a public performance setting on an adhoc basis with audience interaction. Yes, Youtube livestream can also have multiple talking heads but that's video. With Clubhouse being audio, it lowers the barrier for participants who are ok with speaking but don't want to be seen.
- this means "interesting" people who are not podcasters like CEO Tesla Elon Musk can talk to CEO Robinhood Vladimir Tenev in a public forum which attracts an audience. Neither are of them are the "host" or the "guest" in a traditional sense. Neither have to set up a podcast or "upload" their conversation.
That was the original hype with it. The exclusive "invite-only" of famous people created buzz. Maybe the COVID lockdown and bored consumers looking for new entertainment helped boost its initial audience count. However, that doesn't mean the idea of scaling that up by "letting everybody in" ... a.k.a. "The Eternal September" makes Clubhouse more valuable. It seems to have the opposite effect.
> Neither are of them are the "host" or the "guest" in a traditional sense.
This can be entertaining for a bit, but after a while turns into an unstructured dialog ... nice for a fan base and their star, but not for people who want to consume information or entertainment as content.
A good moderator can ensure a conversation works and serves the audience.
> Neither have to set up a podcast or "upload" their conversation.
That's the job of specialists. Like radio or podcast producers. Those also ensure that the audio is of usable quality.
There certainly is a room for adhoc conversations, both with famous people as well as within peer groups, though.
I think you're incorrect/dated about what you consider to be the modern medium for engagement with "long-form high-word-count content."
Beyond engaging with blog posts, or podcasts, or Twitch-style livestreams, the real #1 way people are consuming long-form content these days, is serialized — i.e. as "tweetstorms" or their AV equivalent in Instagram/TikTok. Pre-prepared, granularized "bites" of a long-form piece, that are pushed out one-at-a-time — and engaged with one-at-a-time between other things, as time permits, if you're consuming them "live" — but which also permit/encourage all-at-once consumption if you find them after-the-fact.
There is a reason people use Twitter for blogging, rather than "just having a blog." And that reason is that readers are able to concurrently engage with several ongoing text threads at once, if presented serialized in this manner, in a way that they would find harder to, if presented long-form, or impossible, if presented in a higher-engagement medium like voice or video.
And when readers are able to concurrently engage with several ongoing threads at once, they become willing to consume threads that, in a "consume all-at-once" medium, would never be able to "win" their full attention. Authors can settle for being the thing everyone is scheduling into their #2 or #3 or #5 attention-slot, rather than their #1 attention-slot, and still get engagement based on that.
You'd think, but look at the plethora of sports programming of people sitting in a studio talking about sports. Just talking. Very little clips of sports. Just talking. Then, they have the same kind of shows on fantasy sports. Some of these shows are double duty of a radio program, so it's people talking into a microphone so even less need for actual sports footage.
On the other hand both YouTube channels and podcasts have found a spoken audience. And YouTube is often just someone(s) talking (eg PBS Space Time) that could easily be a podcast.
I did not have a need for content to fill the gaps between a YouTube video, a podcast, and a phone call or group video chat. The exclusivity and talk of rampant racists [0] on the platform killed any interest I had in checking it out. I really don’t get what problem they think this solves for users.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find the concept of hiding behind my profile picture while I speak to potentially hundreds of people in my pajamas to be not nearly as frightening as uploading a video of myself for hordes of 12-year-olds to roast in the comments. There seems to be enough everyday people comfortable enough to do that on TikTok to make it work, though.
Clubhouse’s demise seems to come from entering such a mature space without much of a marketing budget, then. Not enough extroverts know about it to keep the app interesting 24/7 and not much incentive to keep returning to talk on it as well.
I wasn't comparing the creator threshold with TikTok; that's a much bigger leap for me too (though it probably wouldn't have been when I was a teenager, if I was sharing stuff with people my own age).
I was comparing it to Twitter, Facebook and (original) Instagram, etc, in which a much greater proportion of users are posting content rather than just consuming.
It's the having time to think about what you're writing/posting that makes people more comfortable posting on those platforms. And of course you can hide behind an avatar on those platforms too.
Listening to people babble incessantly about shit they don't understand might suck, but being able to follow your favorite independent musicians (or poets or whatever) around the various open mic nights or invited performances they do to listen to them playing live music in different audience contexts might be more fun. I happened to follow a musician on Clubouse whom I was(/am) sponsoring on Patreon, and it was fun getting notifications "Kris Angelis is now playing" every now and then (and before anyone tries to assert as such, no: you can't replace this experience with following her YouTube account, which I also do, for the same reasons people play open mic nights in real life rather than either always doing concerts or simply selling CDs; the Clubhouse mechanism surrounds following individual people, not shows, through shared experiences that generally would be inappropriate to attach to your own feed... YouTube could try to add this--"someone you follow was tagged in this uploaded video" and "someone you follow is right now appearing in this live video"--but the mechanism is non-obvious since they don't do the muxing and is anyway very different from their current experience).
I signed in a few times and it was just full of get rich quick scheme scammers. It was disappointing as I was excited too, but never really had a reason to go back after that.
The VCs take risks. It’s egg on their face but they made enough on Coinbase and others to cover the loss. The market cap may have been 4 billion but the amount invested dramatically less.
> … CH co-founder Paul Davison talking about opening up to all comers, and I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing, therefore more people will use a talk-based app. I've heard others make this claim before, and it's always struck me as a deeply flawed thesis.
I would have thought, and still do think, similarly about YouTube and video vs. reading:
Who wants to Google the answer to something simple and instead of taking 30 seconds to read it, spend 12 minutes watching a YouTuber to eventually maybe see the answer read to you.
“The answer may surprise you” … everyone, apparently.
I don’t have to understand it or get it, I just have to accept that a huge chunk of today’s audience would rather spend 10x longer to receive information visually through a tiny embedded video postcard than quickly read it for themselves. So I have to design product experiences accordingly, not just for kids, but for adult enterprise employees too.
>but far fewer people are comfortable talking in a large group of strangers.
Pandemic has played a definitive role in the growth of Clubhouse, it would be interesting to see how it pans out after people get on to regular activities because they are generally shy to speak to their phones in public as compared to speaking on their phones.
But this varies according to the cultures.
Learnt this after launching couple of voice based apps in circa 2016, It saw huge activity from China when their appstores took our app from playstore and published it on them. Rest of the world didn't use the app much. Diging into this phenomenon I found that voice messages were even preferred over text in China at time.
there are certain patterns that have been true with communication media over a long period of time. You can see that all electronic forms of communication follow these patterns. There is immediate/delayed, one way communication, two way communication, communication with a single person, communication with a group, written, spoken, and visual. You can form combinatorics with these options and find historical examples for all of them.
1) written one way communication to single(e.g. mail, email)
2) written one way communication to audience (e.g. newspapers, blogs, online news)
3) written two way communication - immediate (e.g. notes passed in class, telegram, instant message, slack)
4) written two way communication delayed (e.g. mail, forums, reddit)
5) spoken one way communication to one - delayed (e.g. message passed to a friend, answering machine voice message, voice mail)
6) spoken one way communication to many (e.g. speech, radio, podcast )
7) spoken two way communication to many (e.g. meeting, talk radio, phone party lines)
> Sure, most people are comfortable spending plenty of time chatting with one person or a small group of trusted people, but far fewer people are comfortable talking in a large group of strangers.
This is exacerbated by the real name policy clubhouse has. Maybe there's room for an anonymous voice chat app?
What did "marketers" do to actually ruin everything?
Why can't people just accept the fact that it was just hyped up by some people with a lot of media exposure at the right time: namely when Robinhood VS /r/wallstreetbets was kicking in and people got access to a bit of backstage/roasting, and everyone wanted to be part of it with the whole exclusive invites deal.
People felt like they were special because they had privileged access to something for a few days. They were among "few" celebrities.
At the moment 2 of my old bosses - not tech savvy and usually out of the loop on a lot of matters - sent a message to a group chat saying they have Clubhouse invites for the people in the group, I knew it was over.
Wasn't long before the whole Clubhouse hype died off.
Somehow... it was marketers who ruined it? You simply can't have something exclusive if everyone has access to it. It's not like those celebrities are spilling secrets there, they knew what they were doing there. You were not a fly at a special dinner table listening to exclusive gossip (i'm not saying you, you, but you the user who had that motivation, which I think was the vast majority).
One might argue this was their “viral” marketing strategy and hence may deserve some blame for ruining things. Large VC shops are basically marketing engines for their portfolio companies.
Or that app should have remained exclusive to some users? What users? Who would be the judge of that?
Just multi millionaires? Just founders? Or tech people? I don't even know what "tech people" means.
Even so, if it was supposed to be like that: what would be the appeal for those users if they didn't had access large audiences listening to them? If they want exclusive talks they can just pickup the phone and get any number. Elon wouldn't be roasting Vlad if he didn't get a large audience listening.
People were joining because they wanted to be one of the few that had access to Clubhouse, even if they didn't listen to a single talk.
That's not marketing, that's just the status quo. Clubhouse, crypto, pokemon cards, Supreme, a ride on a rocket to space, you name it.
If they wanted exclusivity for rich people they could have charged 5k USD/year subscription, that would thin it out.
My sentiment exactly. It felt like there is something interesting that could be done with a piece of software like that on mobile (I used it mostly while out on runs or walking).
I remember thinking that there will surely be a fedirated/self-hosted version spun up in no time and then we'll see if the idea really takes off.
Lack of authenticity. Being marketed at has a distinct feeling of bad-faith cynicism. You aren’t interacting with another human, just a biological advertisement.
The thing that you notice almost immediately is that the vast majority of people suck at the medium of Clubhouse. It’s like scrolling through an endless list of the worst podcasts in the world.
Exactly. My first introduction to Clubhouse was when some startup guy at a Hackathon I was attending in Windsor, ON mentioned that he "bought and carries an iPhone just for clubhouse," and said that we (broke college students) should buy iPhones too so we can "network" on Clubhouse. I promptly lost all interest in the app.
In my part of the (3rd) world, people on Twitter(!) would boast of being in erudite and sophisticated Clubhouse rooms while speaking down their noses at Android peasantry[1], most times in good nature. Since twitter launched spaces, that's all I hear about - I don't recall anyone mentioning CH even once.
1. I'm embarrassed to say that the iPhone has become something of a status signal
> It’s like scrolling through an endless list of the worst podcasts in the world.
And from my experience those were some of the better results, second place goes to "how to get rich quick" (and similar) encounters that just gave me the feeling of walking through some pyramid scheme/scam convention buried in tons and tons of emojis.
Not just clubhouse. I get the impression that a few of the major apps are dying. FB - nobody really seems to be posting anymore. Insta - two people actively posting on my feed (I think, hard to tell under all the ads pretending to be posts).
Twitter and tiktok appear to be holding their own though. Seen more "delete twitter" sentiment lately though
Twitter is a cesspool with islands of high value. The cesspool is tolerable because you don't have to swim in it once you've found some decent islands.
I'm guessing the others are similar, but I don't use them much.
The problem appears to be that most social networks get to a stage where they've saturated their potential markets enough that their only way to grow is to find ways of growing engagement, and one major way of doing that is to try to get people to interact more with each other.
Unfortunately that often trigger actions that are completely counter-productive, in e.g. trying to push content people don't want across the islands, and in doing so reducing the value of the platform to users. You may get short term boosts in engagement but long term rot as people are less happy. E.g. see the frequent complaints about Twitters algorithm and how they try to avoid you sorting content chronologically.
[incidentally I have a code base I used to do very basic bayesian filtering and ranking of tweets, as part of a bot; it worked very well at surfacing better content, so sorting the good stuff from Twitter is possible. But I got other things to do and also had concerns about investing more time in anything that relied on the good will of Twitter to keep working...]
> FB - nobody really seems to be posting anymore. Insta - two people actively posting on my feed
Their actual engagement numbers across the general population are quite good. This sounds more representative of your bubble using different platforms than the general state of the app.
> Their actual engagement numbers across the general population are quite good.
I got to see how teenagers were spending way too much time on their smartphone this summer: it was all tiktok and instagram, some twitch, and absolutely zero FB. To them FB is their parents' platform. Their parents are my friends and in my friends group nearly everybody stopped posting on FB. My father (74 y/o now) was at some point relentlessly posting on FB. He got tired of that and never uses the site anymore.
I remember when FB was big, really big, among my friends and family. Now it's a complete wasteland.
I don't dispute that their numbers "across the general population" are good but I just don't see where it's coming from. What's the age group still using FB? For what? Doing what?
WhatsApp and Instagram, sure, people are using that a huge lot: I see that all around me. But FB? Who's still using FB? I just don't see it. Among my friends and family across several groups of age it's as good as dead.
Once in a very rare while (once a year?) I log in to see if I got a private message. Then I check various long lost friends to see if they posted anything new and I see the same old picture they posted years and years ago: nothing new since. If anything people actively remove old pictures.
I don't see people around me just abandoning FB: I see them abandoning it in drones and covering their tracks by deleting past posts / pictures.
Now I'm not worried for FB the company: with WhatsApp and Instagram I'm sure they're doing fine.
> This sounds more representative of your bubble using different platforms
Sure but we're quite some to have our "bubbles" behaving the same way.
I unfortunately don’t know how the numbers break down. However, I see a lot of people that use Facebook for groups. As a result, I wonder how much of their engagement is driven from people posting inside of various groups that might be private.
It might lead to the situation that OP describes where most of the “forum” conversation has died down but it’s thriving in various segments.
Single data point here. I haven’t actually used FB regularly for 5+ years. When I was single, there were a few dating apps that required it so I kept it around for that reason. Currently the only two features that are even remotely tempting on are groups and marketplace. The latter seems to have taken over the role of “classified section” for the internet from Craigslist so I feel like I’ll have no choice except to use it on occasion. But yeah, groups seem increasingly important to FB for locking people in to their site.
Facebook is now for old people; but I think that’s fine, honestly. The old people now are quite tech savvy, people that are now grandparents already have quite good grip on computers.
Exactly. After noticing this, I finally pulled the plug on deleting my FB...but in a creative way... Deleted everything inside the account; posts, pictures, friends.
Kept the account for events, messenger and logins.
From the beginning of the Clubhouse escalation, I always thought: this is BS. I never used it and never will. It is a BS concept. People like Naval and Balajis (both of whom I admire in some aspects) kept on shouting how good it is. I think this is because of the internal handshakes these guys have within the Valley. (One of the founders of CH is Indian.)
But at the end of the day, it is nothing new and the escalation, which I felt would dry up pretty quickly, did dry up pretty quickly.
Edit: I would also like to say how angry I am on heralds like Naval and Balajis. These two guys are ardent promoters and promote anything which they can see, especially Balajis. Much of what Balajis dreams about at night is never gonna happen anyway. There is few truth nuggets here and there and he stumbles upon good predictions here and there but ultimately, that guy is just news source. That guys spends time scrounging news from different sources and present it to people. Which is good actually. But people should remember not to buy everything he says and start dreaming the world's gonna look like that in a few years. That is just day-dreaming. Naval is better because he actually says what's on his mind and not just news.
This is a rant and an opinion which is different from thousands of people out there. And not even related to the post. Sorry.
How is the blogosphere doing? Is it all about forgotten? Or is it alive and well? I don't follow any blogs, but am very glad that they exist. It seems to me to be the most genuine expression of social media.
I don’t really understand why - it’s just a blog with mailing list! - but maybe the addition of payments make it work.
I have to say I really enjoy Substack as a platform. But I thought that about Medium few years ago, and now I actively avoid Medium articles. So, whatever.
I think the difference here is that medium tried to be free and then charge, while substack leaves that up to the author. Medium followed the Web 2.0 model, substack is following Web 3.0? Creators get to choose how to monetize their product, platforms just act as platforms and get out of the way.
The PR success may be the problem. Once something is "the next big thing," people jump in for that reason, which isn't a great reason. At that point, you have a lot of people there randomly just for the sake of it... trying to "succeed at clubhouse" in the abstract, rather than do something they themselves find compelling.
That said, I don't think the concept is the problem. Live is compelling. Look at twitch, youtube livestreams, legacy radio, zoom, sports. That, but less barrier between consumer and creator isn't a bad idea.
CH may or may not sort itself out. Ultimately, social media is an extremely competitive "market." People will either find stuff worth listening to, or leave. It doesn't really matter how many bad podcasts or youtube channels exist and the this blog would have applied equally to twitter, FB and every other medium in its early days. That doesn't mean CH will succeed, it just means that the such points are irrelevant.
Facebook suffered from get rich quick con artists in it’s early days? I don’t think so. FB required you to be a student at a high school or college to participate.
Youtube and podcasts are a better radio because they leverage technology to make content more broadly available and in new media forms and persistently. Nobody listened to radio because they thought they were part of an exclusive fireside chat. It’s because it was the only medium available. IMO without persistent content, without creator platforming and monetization tools, clubhouse is a regression.
The hype brought in people acting with good intentions that you would otherwise not meet and served as a catalyst to chat with people you lost touch with.
This metastasized into agenda pushing of many forms (complaining about black men, both left and right politics, supposed business networking, etc...) from people wishing to exploit this new venue. This drove away most people.
Other social networks deal with this metastasis via the follow mechanism and good suggestions. Without good versions of these, you are left with a public audio chat to talk about events.
I see the potential. It’s radio or podcasts, but unlike those, listeners can participate. You could ask questions. It’s kind of like going to an in-person panel, but you don’t have to solely dedicate yourself to it. You could have this going while driving, or working, or however people normally use podcasts/radio, then there’s this added benefit. Can you imagine joe Rogan where some of his fans could talk with him? Could be nuts (in a good way)
I think the platform is going thru the hype curve, where it’s going to have to find the types of content that work best for that, and build around that. That’s what happened for live video - it also used to be a smorgasbord of chaos, everything from people talking to people just streaming themselves sitting there. Justin tv realized gaming was working / leading to a lot of engagement, and relaunched around that concept (twitch).
I have trouble understanding how Clubhouse was supposed to grow like other social media apps. It doesn't have the traditional social network growth. If I meet someone at university for example, we can add each other on Insta or Snap (these days also TikTok).
Clubhouse doesn't have that. It's closer to Twitch instead, but the difference is Twitch is primarily to broadcast the most popular entertainment media and it has video streaming, something that people want even for podcasts these days.
I think the author is generally right that the format is difficult to do these days. Everything is on demand, and people are used to that. I certainly can't get used to sitting in front of a TV anymore and waiting for the scheduled programming, unless it's something that's really only possible at a certain time (think Super Bowl).
I think it's also true that Twitter has copied it with Spaces in a very useful way. I see it sometimes after a big event, people who are there anyway start it to discuss what they experienced.
But people wrote off Snapchat a few years back too, and apparently they're not doing bad these days even though I don't know anybody using it. Maybe the number of people online is so large now that you don't need total domination anymore to be successful, especially if only a small part of the users are creators and the rest just tunes in.
For me Clubhouse worked for a few weeks, not a few days…
I haven’t used it for the past few months, but I think it’s just a matter of time before they figure things out to make it more usable again:
1) I feel the growth in the number of users (and rooms) has overwhelmed their notifications-based system;
2) the “enjoy the live conversation or nothing” approach they have works great for content creators (which is key), and for people that enjoy serendipity (which is great), but makes it hard to use for many users that may just want to enjoy the content and are not in creator mode at all times.
A lot of the great stuff that happens on CH just happens at the wrong time of the day.
Adding DMs was a great way to help translate participation in rooms into something more valuable and that continues to bring value beyond (outside) CH.
I suspect next steps are going to be in the direction of:
1) supporting the many people that would be willing to trade interactivity in a room for greater flexibility to listen to it passively but at any time;
2) introducing a content recommendation system that allows users to discover the right content that is not live;
3) bring on a user rating system that relies on more than just the number of followers.
Just as this author stated, the rooms in Clubhouse have turned into a garbage dump and many are things most people don't want to be associated with. You could be flicking through and accidentally enter one of these due to the way it's designed.
The clubhouse front page is filled with trash tiktok title like names. It made me cringe everytime I opened it, what's the point of asking me my interests if it is never respected. I uninstalled clubhouse a few days ago
Awesome! Do you guys have a discord? I'd love to chat about Clubdeck and API's. Not looking for features, just love talking dev. Can do a demo for your team too. (finishing a video demonstration atm)
> I am asking you, dear reader, do you know a single soul who has spent more than a few minutes on Clubhouse in the last 3 months? If you do, do they spend regular time on the app?
Yes. It is only A16Z and the other investors, still pumping the dying hype and spamming the notifications on Clubhouse.
Everyone else seemed to have moved on. This thing is not worth $4B as I have already said many times before. [0] [1] [2] [3]
To Downvoters: So I'm assuming someone is now able to provide a justification as to why Clubhouse is worth more than $1B (now it is $4B), when I asked 6 months ago? [0]
You are more than welcome to change my mind. Discuss.
Clubhouse is a strange case of hype app which deliveries basically nothing. I got a invite and I have been testing it for a while, but for me the main problems with clubhouse are:
- lack of a better algorithm on club tab
- lack of interaction: it has not chat for listeners.
- too much marketing as the article well said
- boring people
- not inclusive. How does deaf people can use it?
Clubhouse could have better features and a better social interaction mechanism but it fails on that.
Yes, it's the Times Wedding announcements, which are always sort of like this, but it's hard for me to see this as anything other than an indicator that Clubhouse is a niche app for...influencers...who influence...other influencers? I guess?
I love podcasts, I love livestreams (archived, mostly - I rarely have the time to sit and listen live), yet this whole concept doesn’t appeal to me. It seems to want to combine half of the concept of Discord (IRC with voice chat) with the atmosphere of a conference, spontaneously. Maybe given time people can find the organisational backbone to make it happen but that sounds like it would kill the spontaneity and also probably the mass appeal goal.
I remain a luddite in this regard but I still hope they make it fun and popular if it’s possible. There’s rarely much new under the sun nowadays.
I have to second everything the author said about content. I joined early in CH and there were a bunch of interesting people talking about interesting things. It was like being a fly on the wall listening to people much more interesting than me have insightful conversations, especially around things like software and science and venture capital. Now everything is about wellness or the latest crypto currency fad or straight up con artists selling self actualization as the author pointed out, or strangely, people starting rooms for the purpose of begging for positions in the Biden administration. I spend a few minutes a month recently logging on and looking for something interesting. Nothing.
Also seconded about unlike Twitter I have to make an effort to use CH. I put on headphones, make sure I’m listening to get any signal at all otherwise it’s like being on the subway.
It’s hard for me to see how CH could be interesting generally to anyone except those who want to be influencers talking to other influencers or pump up their cryptocurrency.
Never was invited, but for some reason the app was heavily promoted in germany for a time.
For some period of weeks during the pandemic, all kinds of already well-known public figures were announcing moderated clubhouse discussions.
That made the app feel like a platform for audio-only panel discussions or TED talks. Interesting, but even if someone had invited me, it would have never occurred to me to create a room myself or interact anymore than you'd interact with the panelists at a conference.
Galloway and Swisher pegged Clubhouse correctly months ago on their podcast, saying it’s a feature not a platform. All the actual platforms are just cloning it.
I got invited a bunch. Never accepted because Clubhose on Android didn't exist. Android is the daily driver. I only use my iPhone to click on OK in the Apple developer app... and occasionally to do Facetime. I guess they launched on Android in May... I haven't seen an invite in a few months, so I assumed that ignoring Clubhouse is probably a safe bet.
I used it a ton during the Israeli conflict to gain some perspective of the other side. Hearing from real ppl, and being able to share my experiences. But honestly it just supported my previously held beliefs of who they were. I was hoping to hear something new, but of all the people I spoke with, it turned out the news perfectly represented them.
It was an exclusive club that sounded very appealing to those on the outside.
But when you actually got inside, the place was covered in a mess of emoji vomit and it wasn't easy to find an interesting conversation.
It was also constrained to mobile, with a UI that doesn't seem great (especially for large rooms). May have been more usable if it had supported desktop/web clients.
I'm curious about the name collision between clubhouse.com, the audio people and clubhouse.io, the project management people.
Was whoever second not aware? Was it not a concern? Is clubhouse.io afraid of getting any misplaced flak from the big security breach at clubhouse.com?
So what you need to do is take each of these talkers and load their transcripts into a GPT3 model and then let people "talk" with that model.
Call it GPP(tm) and see if anyone gets the reference. For giggles, expand the context length to 4096 tokens and it will even have a better "memory." Now store that context for each ongoing conversation. CH could soon stand for Chatbot Heaven.
I think the appeal of clubhouse was its exclusivity and that we were all in lockdown craving contact and its time of release.That's mostly over now despite the Delta variant taking this into extra innings so who needs this thing? It's just another social network now.
They should have remained very small, very exclusive, and you have to pay for access. There's a market for a private social media platform for "elites" with premium features based around privacy and data protection.
Just like A Small World or Decayenne both of which flamed out trying to monetize an "elite" social network ? I still get spam about renting Yachts for the summer.
Lots of social networks failed before FB took off, a similar network failing doesn't mean it would fail. The key is Clubhouse's selling feature and hype came from the fact that was where the cool kids were, and the audio setup made it harder for conversations to leak to the riff raff. Once both those things were untrue, it lost its hype/sheen.
Wasn’t the initial draw of Clubhouse almost entirely the fact that there were a few celebrities and famous people using it, so you might join a room where there were a bunch of celebrities and you may also be able to talk to them!
I wonder if they still have 2 line advertisements for party lines printed in the back of cheesy magazines? I never used them, but I did meet someone who found a long lost sister while chatting with strangers
I was pretty much aware of their capability considering how delayed they launched their Android counterpart considering the Agora SDK was literally geared towards making cross platform stuff a breeze.
People kept saying, "Josh, you have to get on Clubhouse. It's growing fast. A land grab. People are staking claims. You could be the sustainability guy on the site. Don't miss it." I don't use Apple, so had to borrow a friend's old phone to try using it.
I participated in a few conversations and met some people, but that's what I would have done otherwise. I'll still participate in it sometimes, but the iPhone has been sitting in the closet for a while and I haven't installed it on my regular phone. I don't regret the time I spent on it, but will be more prepared for the next trendy trend: "Oh, you mean like Clubhouse?"
The best thing about Clubhouse is that Twitter created Spaces, and some of my favorite voices in tech started doing shows there. I enjoy listening to Bryan Cantrill talk.
I've never used it but I know folks who liked Clubhouse because they could listen in while getting other stuff done in their loves. Like radio but a bit specialized? Idk.
ClubHouse has been the generator of profound experiences for me.
Day before yesterday, I got to take part in a session with the discoverer of 2014 UN271 with a physicist and an ex-JPLer. It took some wrangling to get everyone together, but the conversation was stimulating. We touched on the possible origin of the object, improving the algorithms, the discovery process for making a groundbreaking find etc.
While we were having our discussion, a very senior NASA official stopped by. After listening for some time, the official came up on stage. We ended up discussing the possibility of a mission to capture samples in aerogel for this object like NASA's Stardust project. We have about a decade before it reaches its perihelion, so we have some time to figure out what to shoot at it to get as many samples as we can.
It felt awe inspiring to sit there and watch people connect. And actually talk about something that matters with people who can do something about it.
I have no doubt that as ClubHouse grows, these moments will become rarer. There's already change in the air. The community is responding organically. The vast majority of rooms on CH aren't public. Most of the interesting rooms in my "hallway" are private and amongst busy people leading active intellectual lives who are seeking to connect in the least obtrusive way possible.
Furthermore, ClubHouse usage seems to be highly network dependent. There are some people for whom it is incredibly sticky. There are others for whom it just doesn't stick. However, I've noticed that despite Twitter Spaces, Greenroom etc. more people seem to have been sticking with ClubHouse than other platforms. And I suspect that's because of the very subtle + clever product decisions the ClubHouse team has made.
For e.g., Spotify's Greenroom has a "gems" systems, and the platform quickly devolved into people giving each other "gems" for being on stage etc. I suspect this is meant for monetization later on. But it made the conversations feel less organic. And the app seems to be a mild ghost town now. (as you can't make rooms privately, when I last checked - and you had to do it under a public topic, I couldn't find any activity on there).
Twitter's Spaces also has similar issues with retention, though the cause there is more complicated. We explored it more heavily, and it wasn't sticky in the same way ClubHouse was.
There is usually a reason why these things get valued at absurd amounts. Some of it is the broader asset bubble. A lot of it is irrational exuberance. But there has to be something to be exuberant about.
Few people believe me when I tell them this, but if you're the right kind of person, there's something here. The people who love this thing love it a lot. And the experiences it produces are magic.
I got to do a discussion with someone who worked in the early new space industry, in the early '00s, right after Virgin Galactic's flight. His friends died to make new space a reality. And it was one of the most moving things I've experienced. I cried when he talked about their sacrifice. And how it was a step towards a better future for all humankind.
However, at the same time, the company has made many missteps. Discovery sucks. My talk with the discoverer of the largest comet ever found, the senior NASA official, and a bunch of very well informed physicists and space nerds barely cracked 30 listeners. Other times, a topic might skyrocket and end up getting 400+. The application succeeds in creating interesting experiences. But it fails to surface them. A lot of manual tuning is required.
The end of the invite-only system was short-sighted. It gave ClubHouse the unique ability to nuke trolls, fake accounts, and their enablers by looking at the social graph of who invited whom. They seem to have given this up in exchange for rapid growth.
I think most people just wanted to join because they thought they'd get private access to Elon Musk. Instead, they got the social network equivalent of Qibi.
Ed Zitron, the guy who wrote this, is a publicist. Whenever I see a publicist taking time out of their busy schedule to publicly tear down a brand, it always makes me curious about their current/future client list
Clubhouse's moment in the spotlight seemed to be largely due to the eagerness of certain media types to try to embarrass VCs and silicon valley personalities. I think the appetite for "let's just find someone's social media output and shame them" is receding somewhat, and the lack of exclusivity in clubhouse is also attenuating its value there.
This was a very well written article on this person’s opinion backed with some, in my opinion, sketchy data points. As I read it, I couldn’t help but to feel a little cringy like reading a gossip magazine. Sorry to be off topic but what motivates someone to write an entire article to prove to everyone that a startup sucks. The very fact that they felt compelled to try to convince people the startup isn’t relevant all the while acknowledging that it is relevant enough to warrant this post is interesting.
It reads to me like, “stop talking about X so much, no one cares about X”.
I think it is great that startups can raise money during a hype cycle and hopefully find product market fit. The truth is that we just really don’t know what Will take off. If it were super obvious it would already be done. Yet we have break outs all the time.
With the money, hype and time that Cloubhouse has left, I really hope they become huge. I love seeing people build things and I love seeing money poured into them to watch the experiment have time to grow.
The motivation for writing this post is the same as the motivation for any post —- it’s an interesting story. It seems like you might be taking offense from a post that’s just trying to analyze a case where the perceived hype, and the underlying assumptions for the reason for the perceived hype, were disassociated from the actual numbers seen during the general release of the app.
But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspiring.
I was listening to the Good Time Show last week with CH co-founder Paul Davison talking about opening up to all comers, and I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing, therefore more people will use a talk-based app. I've heard others make this claim before, and it's always struck me as a deeply flawed thesis.
Sure, most people are comfortable spending plenty of time chatting with one person or a small group of trusted people, but far fewer people are comfortable talking in a large group of strangers.
The confidence threshold is much much lower for text and photo-based platforms, as you have time to craft your content and you can always (where supported) edit or just delete post if you have second thoughts.
But public talk-based platforms trigger all the same fear-reactions that live public speaking triggers, so far fewer people are comfortable doing it, and hence we get exactly what we see – a platform dominated by a relatively small number of outlier extraverts/confident speakers.
I keep thinking: Andreessen Horowitz aren't stupid investors, they must have thought of this and must be working with the founders to develop ways to keep growing user numbers and engagement. But I'm yet to see any signs this is the case, and more and more it feels like everyone has bought into this flawed thesis, and that we're witnessing a giant naked emperor scenario.