I used Dialup for a while when it was added as a Startup School feature and I’m using Clubhouse on and off now. Both of them suffer from tragedy of the commons.

I used Dialup for a while when it was added as a Startup School feature and I’m using Clubhouse on and off now. Both of them suffer from tragedy of the commons. DialUp was excellent while startup school founders were still using it, but the call pool diluted over time and several times the calls dropped randomly with no way to reach the person back. Because of the dropped calls we would start the conversation with the name of our business first, so we could continue on another channel if interrupted. So the conversations were still great enough to persist through the technical issues (startup founders like me, working through challenges we could both relate to, brainstorming and coming up with great solutions, etc). All it took to stop using the service were several calls where people who answered were on there just because they were bored instead of working on something and the value of it disappeared. Clubhouse was quite interesting a few weeks ago, when there were fewer running threads and even if many of them were were noise, the HN/YC type people would aggregate around one or two. We had fun conversations about 4th+ dimension mathematical shapes, mobile app development, startup revenue models, technical stacks, prototyping, etc. Now the intimate threads are increasingly turning into hustle culture or scam-like conference podiums with huge crowds waiting Disneyland style for a chance to ask one question, which inevitably diverts most conversations into the same types of generic questions. You have to scroll down many levels and if there is any interesting technical topic, the group is usually very small and increasingly diluted by the noise. Clubhouse needs to enable better filtering of conversation topics or they will lose that early crowd of valuable users fast. Just as HN branched off from Reddit, there needs to be a Clubhouse for the HN/Startup School/YC crowd moderated with the same standards as HN.