13 ms·

Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

194 points by shp0ngle 5y ago

Havoc 5y ago
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
- vidarh 5y ago
  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...]
  - api 5y ago
    Your first sentence also perfectly describes Reddit.
    - makapuf 5y ago
      Also the Internet
      - ta988 5y ago
        Also group of humans in general.
        JonathanMerklin 5y ago
        The generalization we're looking for here is Sturgeon's Law.
        Nydhal 5y ago
        Thank you.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 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.
  - peytoncasper 5y ago
    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.
    - hanklazard 5y ago
      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.
    - dd36 5y ago
      Yes. IME, Facebook surfaces group postings over friend postings.
    - truth_ 5y ago
      I haven't posted outside an FB group in 5 years. If it were not for those groups, I would have deleted my FB account. And I treat FB as a non-professional networking platform. You meet someone at a wedding or a funeral who you find tolerable? Add them to your FB. Thus, with people you are not intimate enough to share your cell number or talk over the phone, and you still want to keep in touch, you add them to your FB. That's how I see it.
- valtism 5y ago
  I've only ever seen the "delete twitter" sentiment here on HN – mostly by the crowd who gnash teeth about "cancel culture" and social justice.
- mclightning 5y ago
  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.
aetherson 5y ago
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.
thejackgoode 5y ago
I enjoyed the Clubhouse for a week. There were very dense and valuable conversations in certain segments. However, it quickly became the case for changing the saying “marketers ruin everything” to “marketers ruin everything really really fast”
- mathattack 5y ago
  Scams and self promotion too. :-) The speed of people adding and then ignoring outpaced Google Plus.
- prox 5y ago
  So what exactly brings this turn about? Is it the notion of content becoming an advertisement?
  - pram 5y ago
    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.
- libertine 5y ago
  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).
phpisatrash 5y ago
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.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  > - not inclusive. How does deaf people can use it? Wasn't Clubhouse iOS only at the start?
  - namibj 5y ago
    They finally fixed that problem?
cblconfederate 5y ago
the hype machine worked well though. In fact the hype is their biggest asset. Nice. Do mighty app next
- bluescrn 5y ago
  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.
rvz 5y ago
> 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861613 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035533 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26672637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26672637
tomhoward 5y ago
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.
- mathattack 5y ago
  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.
- ngc248 5y ago
  >>> because talking has less friction than writing, therefore more people will use a talk-based app. In a way this is true, those who don't know how to read or write also can use a talk only app. But talking BS also has less friction ... so there will be more noise than signal I presume.
mordymoop 5y ago
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.
- ugjka 5y ago
  Dumbassery regarding being IOS only and invite only resulted me never trying it and I no longer care to try it, the hype is over
  - MisterSandman 5y ago
    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.
  - alienthrowaway 5y ago
    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
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  > 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.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  Good quality content is almost always edited, not live.
locallost 5y ago
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.
villgax 5y ago
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.
spodek 5y ago
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?"
wly_cdgr 5y ago
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
mongol 5y ago
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.
- gbear605 5y ago
  I follow hundreds of them and they’re mostly still alive, so my area of the blogosphere at least is.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Substack is the new rage now. 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.
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    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.
dalbasal 5y ago
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.
- dcow 5y ago
  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.
wombatpm 5y ago
Clubhouse appeared to be live call in radio programs with random hosts - on the internet
todd3834 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- derangedHorse 5y ago
  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.
  - todd3834 5y ago
    That’s a fair point. I’m not taking offense but I did feel cringy reading it. I did think it was well written.
okareaman 5y ago
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
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
babesh 5y ago
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.
chamsom 5y ago
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.
imglorp 5y ago
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?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 5y ago
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.
- jimmySixDOF 5y ago
  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.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    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.
matco11 5y ago
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.
IceDane 5y ago
Who is the "everybody" that is talking about clubhouse? I haven't heard any mention of this since it was introduced. It's totally dead in the water.
pylon 5y ago
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.
addicted 5y ago
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! And Bitcoin. That’s
jitl 5y ago
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.
catillac 5y ago
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.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
Are there any credible estimates for Clubhouse’s remaining runway?
- rvz 5y ago
  Probably getting sued by Houseparty (Epic Games) for copying their logo. They might as well beg to them for an acquisition and rebrand to ClubHouseParty.
cainxinth 5y ago
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.
- Ecstatify 5y ago
  If Galloway is bearish on Clubhouse, I’m now bullish on it even though I uninstalled the app. The next Facebook!
  - cainxinth 5y ago
    Hah!
prestigious 5y ago
They didn’t iterate fast enough. Nothing to do while listening, at least now you can dm but it needed chat a long time ago.
- Infinitesimus 5y ago
  > Nothing to do while listening 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.
varelse 5y ago
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. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation... 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.
indymike 5y ago
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.
thomasfromcdnjs 5y ago
I've been having fun with Clubhouse, spent the last 3 weeks integrating it with GPT-3 and Google Speech. https://github.com/thomasdavis/omega https://github.com/thomasdavis/omega Writing a blog post at the moment to post on HN this week. Draft: https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/ https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/
- okareaman 5y ago
  You could turn it into Lenny Bot 2.0 to further frustrate marketing callers. [NSFW] Alice from Your Debt Relief Program tells Lenny to f--k himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3qAItE7lxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3qAItE7lxw
- pierre_clubdeck 5y ago
  Clubdeck dev here - pretty cool idea :)
  - thomasfromcdnjs 5y 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)
    - pierre_clubdeck 5y ago
      No we don’t. You can find us on Twitter (see contacts on our website)
      - thomasfromcdnjs 5y ago
        No worries, been following you on Twitter for a while now, keep up the good work!
areoform 5y ago
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.
Superblazer 5y ago
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
legerdemain 5y ago
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.
bilater 5y ago
It's basically a feature rather than a company. Unless they offer something drastically different, Twitter Spaces will (has?) periscope them.
manigandham 5y ago
This was fairly predictable. There's a good thread by Shaan Puri about how it would all go down that I found amusing: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913 https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913
- habitue 5y ago
  This was a long thread but it was very entertaining. Read like an episode of Silicon Valley.
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  That was a very well written Tweet thread. Thanks for posting.
vxNsr 5y ago
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.
xivzgrev 5y ago
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 wouldn’t rule it out just yet.
wdr1 5y ago
I used Clubhouse for a bit, but I didn't really care for it. It came across as a smug version of AM talk radio.
xg15 5y ago
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.
md_ 5y ago
I can't help but think of this hilarious NY Times weddings announcement about a couple of "influencers" who met on Clubhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/style/natasha-grano-michael-graziano-wedding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/style/natasha-grano-micha.... 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? Or perhaps I'm just old.
beezischillin 5y ago
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.
hermitsings 5y ago
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.
ulfw 5y ago
I never understood the hype around it. It's just talk-radio over the internet. With smaller audiences. What am I missing?

194 points by shp0ngle 5y ago

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

vidarh 5y ago
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...]
- api 5y ago
  Your first sentence also perfectly describes Reddit.
  - makapuf 5y ago
    Also the Internet
    - ta988 5y ago
      Also group of humans in general.
      - JonathanMerklin 5y ago
        The generalization we're looking for here is Sturgeon's Law.
        Nydhal 5y ago
        Thank you.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 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.
- peytoncasper 5y ago
  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.
  - hanklazard 5y ago
    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.
  - dd36 5y ago
    Yes. IME, Facebook surfaces group postings over friend postings.
  - truth_ 5y ago
    I haven't posted outside an FB group in 5 years. If it were not for those groups, I would have deleted my FB account. And I treat FB as a non-professional networking platform. You meet someone at a wedding or a funeral who you find tolerable? Add them to your FB. Thus, with people you are not intimate enough to share your cell number or talk over the phone, and you still want to keep in touch, you add them to your FB. That's how I see it.
valtism 5y ago
I've only ever seen the "delete twitter" sentiment here on HN – mostly by the crowd who gnash teeth about "cancel culture" and social justice.
mclightning 5y ago
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.

aetherson 5y ago

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.

thejackgoode 5y ago

I enjoyed the Clubhouse for a week. There were very dense and valuable conversations in certain segments. However, it quickly became the case for changing the saying “marketers ruin everything” to “marketers ruin everything really really fast”

mathattack 5y ago
Scams and self promotion too. :-) The speed of people adding and then ignoring outpaced Google Plus.
prox 5y ago
So what exactly brings this turn about? Is it the notion of content becoming an advertisement?
- pram 5y ago
  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.
libertine 5y ago
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).

phpisatrash 5y ago

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.

arvinsim 5y ago
> - not inclusive. How does deaf people can use it? Wasn't Clubhouse iOS only at the start?
- namibj 5y ago
  They finally fixed that problem?

cblconfederate 5y ago

the hype machine worked well though. In fact the hype is their biggest asset. Nice. Do mighty app next

bluescrn 5y ago
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.

rvz 5y ago

> 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861613 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035533 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26672637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26672637

tomhoward 5y ago

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.

mathattack 5y ago
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.
ngc248 5y ago
>>> because talking has less friction than writing, therefore more people will use a talk-based app. In a way this is true, those who don't know how to read or write also can use a talk only app. But talking BS also has less friction ... so there will be more noise than signal I presume.

mordymoop 5y ago

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.

ugjka 5y ago
Dumbassery regarding being IOS only and invite only resulted me never trying it and I no longer care to try it, the hype is over
- MisterSandman 5y ago
  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.
- alienthrowaway 5y ago
  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
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
> 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.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
Good quality content is almost always edited, not live.

locallost 5y ago

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.

villgax 5y ago

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.

spodek 5y ago

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?"

wly_cdgr 5y ago

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

mongol 5y ago

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.

gbear605 5y ago
I follow hundreds of them and they’re mostly still alive, so my area of the blogosphere at least is.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Substack is the new rage now. 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.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  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.

dalbasal 5y ago

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.

dcow 5y ago
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.

wombatpm 5y ago

Clubhouse appeared to be live call in radio programs with random hosts - on the internet

todd3834 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
derangedHorse 5y ago
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.
- todd3834 5y ago
  That’s a fair point. I’m not taking offense but I did feel cringy reading it. I did think it was well written.

okareaman 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

babesh 5y ago

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.

chamsom 5y ago

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.

imglorp 5y ago

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?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 5y ago

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.

jimmySixDOF 5y ago
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.
- fullshark 5y ago
  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.

matco11 5y ago

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.

IceDane 5y ago

Who is the "everybody" that is talking about clubhouse? I haven't heard any mention of this since it was introduced. It's totally dead in the water.

pylon 5y ago

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.

addicted 5y ago

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! And Bitcoin. That’s

jitl 5y ago

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.

catillac 5y ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

Are there any credible estimates for Clubhouse’s remaining runway?

rvz 5y ago
Probably getting sued by Houseparty (Epic Games) for copying their logo. They might as well beg to them for an acquisition and rebrand to ClubHouseParty.

cainxinth 5y ago

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.

Ecstatify 5y ago
If Galloway is bearish on Clubhouse, I’m now bullish on it even though I uninstalled the app. The next Facebook!
- cainxinth 5y ago
  Hah!

prestigious 5y ago

They didn’t iterate fast enough. Nothing to do while listening, at least now you can dm but it needed chat a long time ago.

Infinitesimus 5y ago
> Nothing to do while listening 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.

varelse 5y ago

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. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation... 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.

indymike 5y ago

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.

thomasfromcdnjs 5y ago

I've been having fun with Clubhouse, spent the last 3 weeks integrating it with GPT-3 and Google Speech. https://github.com/thomasdavis/omega https://github.com/thomasdavis/omega Writing a blog post at the moment to post on HN this week. Draft: https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/ https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/

okareaman 5y ago
You could turn it into Lenny Bot 2.0 to further frustrate marketing callers. [NSFW] Alice from Your Debt Relief Program tells Lenny to f--k himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3qAItE7lxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3qAItE7lxw
pierre_clubdeck 5y ago
Clubdeck dev here - pretty cool idea :)
- thomasfromcdnjs 5y 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)
  - pierre_clubdeck 5y ago
    No we don’t. You can find us on Twitter (see contacts on our website)
    - thomasfromcdnjs 5y ago
      No worries, been following you on Twitter for a while now, keep up the good work!

areoform 5y ago

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.

Superblazer 5y ago

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

legerdemain 5y ago

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.

bilater 5y ago

It's basically a feature rather than a company. Unless they offer something drastically different, Twitter Spaces will (has?) periscope them.

manigandham 5y ago

This was fairly predictable. There's a good thread by Shaan Puri about how it would all go down that I found amusing: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913 https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

habitue 5y ago
This was a long thread but it was very entertaining. Read like an episode of Silicon Valley.
thundergolfer 5y ago
That was a very well written Tweet thread. Thanks for posting.

vxNsr 5y ago

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.

xivzgrev 5y ago

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 wouldn’t rule it out just yet.

wdr1 5y ago

I used Clubhouse for a bit, but I didn't really care for it. It came across as a smug version of AM talk radio.

xg15 5y ago

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.

md_ 5y ago

I can't help but think of this hilarious NY Times weddings announcement about a couple of "influencers" who met on Clubhouse: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/style/natasha-grano-michael-graziano-wedding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/style/natasha-grano-micha.... 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? Or perhaps I'm just old.

beezischillin 5y ago

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.

hermitsings 5y ago

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.

ulfw 5y ago

I never understood the hype around it. It's just talk-radio over the internet. With smaller audiences. What am I missing?