9 ms·
Clubhouse for X – The emerging trend of audio-only applications
- slezyr 6y agoI wonder how popular this trend is going to be? I don't like audio books/podcasts, etc. and prefer text-only content.
- scandox 6y agoI am text and audio. Dislike photos and video. Someone probably needs to start classifying these preferences into some kind of shorthand. People can declare them with their pronouns and orientation.
- jtsiskin 6y agoThis likely depends a lot on lifestyle - those with long commutes, workout a lot, certain types of jobs, etc. will have very different preferences than a WFH programmer
- newsclues 6y agoAre we trending towards more focus or multiple experiences dominating our lives? I love reading but am audio book while I mow the lawn offers two experiences at the same time. More time.
- cvaidya1986 6y agoThere’s audiences for both
- dharmab 6y agoAnd contexts for both, too. I prefer text at home and audio in the car (even as a passenger) or on the train.
- sjg007 6y agoI thought I preferred text but because I spend so much time online in my “free time” I prefer audio books and podcasts.
- genericacct 6y agoPreferring text-only content is one of the reasons i come to HN a lot but as i get older my eyesight is getting worse. Maybe one day TTS will be good enough to be a pleasure to listen to but I think audio-only forum software could lead to interesting results.
- pmontra 6y agoI'm on the same trajectory but audio and also video are slow compared to text, even if you listen and watch at faster than real time speed. You can read this message almost at a glance, you would have to listen to all of it and maybe again.
- matwood 6y agoI hate video, like audio for discussion type topics, and text for everything else. But, nothing annoys me more than when I'm looking for how to do something (let's say fix my refrigerator), and I have to watch/skip around a 10 minute youtube video then pause so I can see the picture and then listen to bits over and over to understand what I need to do. Maybe I'm just old, but a few pics and text description would be so much easier.
- novok 6y agoAudio is good when your busy doing something that doesn’t engage the language part of your brain, like workouts, driving, walks alone, washing dishes, standing room train commutes, etc
- petercooper 6y agoAudio is always going to be a thing. As is video. As is text. As are books. And so on. It's not a zero sum game. People will continue to blog, tweet, and write books for us to enjoy even if lots of people are having a great time with podcasts or Clubhouse :-)
- samvher 6y agoRelevant project, voice only forum for sharing agricultural knowledge: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1753326.1753434 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1753326.1753434
- chrisco255 6y agoInteresting but seems like this was conducted before smart phones really took off in India (2010). Curious if a more recent study has been done.
- chasing 6y agoFor what it’s worth, I built what I call a “zero screen app” for an art installation a couple of years ago. “Zero screen” meaning “you’re supposed to be experiencing the space around you, so the app has almost nothing on-screen worth looking at and is basically just black.” Even though the idea was that the participants would be using the app to interact with the space. It’s kind of liberating! Makes you consider the physicality of the device itself in entirely new ways. Recommended!
- votick 6y agoI'm pretty bullish on this trend. Relevant project (mine): https://audiblogs.com https://audiblogs.com (lets you listen to any blog posts in your podcast player. It's like Audible for blogs.)
- afro88 6y agoThis looks great. Looking forward to firefox support.
- xiaolingxiao 6y agocan you export them as MP3s?
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoI never plug here, but I am building a live audio school for group studying. At me here if you guys want to try it out. The project started in April 2020 and a week after I started prototyping I find out about clubhouse. Face palm.
- stevewodil 6y agoIt's not clear what you mean by "live audio school for group studying". Is that anything different than a discord audio channel?
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoYup, we make it super easy for you to make study materials. And you can share them with other groups.
- cvhashim 6y agoClubhouse is in a completely different domain from the problem you seem to be working on. Just think of clubhouse as twitter for audio. Audio-based social media platform is how I view it.
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoYeah for sure, I've been on Clubhouse for a bit now and it's devolved from casual hangout dominant to self-promo/shark-tank like room dominant.
- narrationbox 6y agoWe never expected audio to be this popular either when we built Narration Box :)
- baskire 6y agoVideo is draining. You have to always be “on”. It’s worse than physical meetings as the camera is always on. Audio on the other hand let’s you focus on just the speaker. And what they are saying. No fancy UI to distract. No looking at the bookshelf in the speakers background. Just audio.
- mellosouls 6y agoMore on the main contender: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/check-1-2-3 https://www.joinclubhouse.com/check-1-2-3 I note that while one of its main claimed aims is to encourage diversity, it is Apple only...
- dimensi0nal 6y agoAndroid users make your app less cool
- stevewodil 6y agoAs an Android user I can confirm this, I am not cool
- accosine 6y agoThis comment made me login into my dormant HN account just to upvote it.
- fatsdomino001 6y agoSame with web users apparently...
- stevewodil 6y agoIt's very common for new apps to launch just on iOS because it simplifies the development process. We've seen this time and time again (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.). If they get big enough to justify a bigger more diverse dev team I'm sure they'll get around to a web version as well if they can deliver the same experience on web.
- fatsdomino001 6y agoWhy not begin on web though? I mean I get it for clubhouse, instagram and snapchat because they're making use of phone functions like easily being able to record audio or take pictures... still it's interesting how much web gets belittled compared to apps these days.
- system16 6y agoI find Clubhouse interesting in that its the first social media app I've tried that I really could not understand the widespread appeal, even if it didn't appeal to me personally. The rooms I did listen in on seemed to be full of people promoting themselves to each other. Most seemed like almost caricatures of Bay Area VC or entrepreneur types, or the most left-leaning Twitterati. I just kept asking myself, who would want to listen or engage with this? Clearly I'm the minority as it seems to be blowing up.
- solumos 6y agoSame. What really seals the "echo chamber"-ness for me, is that they have a priority on their "about" page claiming they're serious about inclusion, yet it's still an iOS-only invite-only beta.
- astrea 6y agoI mean, you said it yourself, it is a beta.
- petercooper 6y agoiOS-only aside, Clubhouse is one of the most diverse modern social apps I've been on. As a white man, I often seem to be in the racial or gender minority which is refreshing and helps me hear more interesting conversations and viewpoints.
- bschne 6y agoJoined yesterday after it started taking off in part of Europe for some reason or other. First impression is that it's nice that people talk longer, don't cut each other off as much as in other debates, etc. but it definitely sounds like mostly berlin tech entrepreneurs & VCs (and some tech-adjacent politicians/journalists/...) at this point, and the "diversity" on panels is somewhat superficial (people from mildly different backgrounds who think alike vs. people from whatever background with deeper differences in viewpoints). That being said I also randomly ended up in a room with improvised music & poetry, so there do seem to be different things going on. I can see myself using this if the content diversifies further into different topics, e.g. I'd enjoy loose discussions about e.g. academic / more technical topics, etc. For now it sounds mostly like your run of the mill panel discussion at a big tech conf., which can be inspiring for a bit but not everyday.
- chente 6y agoSo party lines are back?
- JohnCurran 6y agoClubhouse looks cool! Has anyone gotten approved from the waitlist and know about how long it took? I just signed up
- dakial1 6y agoI don't have the app, but from what I've seen from some reviews of it, it seems that Clubhouse is only popular because there are interesting people interacting in it. That will be a problem to scale because, as we all know, the average human being is not that interesting. I can think of many apps that were like that in the beginning only to become something else afterwards (not necessarily being unsuccessful). The first that comes to my mind is Quora, that was a very interesting place in the beginning, but not so much today (but hey, still valuable!)
- vhiremath4 6y agoWhen I started on Clubhouse I was hooked the first night. I had never talked to so many black people in my entire life (I’m an Asian Indian American for context). I felt like I got exposed to more black American culture in 6 hours on Clubhouse than in my entire life. I also felt extremely drained. It was a lot of consumption. I fell off for a little while as I realized my feed getting pretty echo chamber like. Then I started seeing extremely interesting conversations pop up such as the main PM on Google’s Alpha Fold answering questions live about the technology. Most recently the mayors of SF, Austin, Miami, and Seattle were on talking about the massive swell movement of tech between these ecosystems. They were taking questions from a live audience. There is something magical going on here. My two cents.