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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, like

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.
codethief 5y ago
> 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.
- dylan604 5y ago
  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.
- sunstone 5y ago
  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.
  - kikokikokiko 5y ago
    SpaceTime has AMAZING graphics though, I don't think it's the best example of a channel that would not lose quality on an audio only format.
- jasode 5y ago
  >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_programs#Popular_radio_shows_in_the_United_States 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.
achenatx 5y ago
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) etc etc
ta988 5y ago
I had the same experience with lunchclub.
Firebrand 5y ago
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.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  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.
ekster 5y ago
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.
ourcat 5y ago
Audio is fairly unique in that it's a medium that can be consumed and created while doing something else.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
> 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?
saurik 5y ago
FWIW, here are some musicians playing the harp? https://www.clubhouse.com/room/xq7bKDed https://www.clubhouse.com/room/xq7bKDed 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).
truth_ 5y ago
> I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing That's why cellphone exists. And now several VOIP services, and meeting apps. Skype exists for years! All of these let you talk seamlessly with a group. Other arguments in favor of CH might be valid, but this one is weak.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
>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.
Terretta 5y ago
> … 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.

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.

codethief 5y ago

> 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.

dylan604 5y ago
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.
sunstone 5y ago
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.
- kikokikokiko 5y ago
  SpaceTime has AMAZING graphics though, I don't think it's the best example of a channel that would not lose quality on an audio only format.
jasode 5y ago
>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_programs#Popular_radio_shows_in_the_United_States 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.

achenatx 5y ago

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) etc etc

ta988 5y ago

I had the same experience with lunchclub.

Firebrand 5y ago

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.

tomhoward 5y ago
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.

ekster 5y ago

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.

ourcat 5y ago

Audio is fairly unique in that it's a medium that can be consumed and created while doing something else.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

> 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?

saurik 5y ago

FWIW, here are some musicians playing the harp? https://www.clubhouse.com/room/xq7bKDed https://www.clubhouse.com/room/xq7bKDed 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).

truth_ 5y ago

> I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing That's why cellphone exists. And now several VOIP services, and meeting apps. Skype exists for years! All of these let you talk seamlessly with a group. Other arguments in favor of CH might be valid, but this one is weak.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

>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.

Terretta 5y ago

> … 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.