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Ask HN: Do you still use Clubhouse app?
I stopped using it 5-6 months back as most rooms I find were pretty boring or just people arguing about random stuff.
If you still use it, what are some interesting rooms you follow?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wly_cdgr 5y agoFor me most of the appeal of social media is that it's async, so Clubhouse never really interested me. But if I did want to have that experience there are any number of relevant-to-my-interests Discords with voice chat
- TekMol 5y agoIt would be cool if there was something like "HN in Audio" on ClubHouse. That was what I was hoping when I first tried it. Or something like "Indie Hackers talking to each other". Or "Digital Nomad audio meetups". But I never found interesting channels. Any suggestions?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- johnebgd 5y agoI’d find a hacker news audio channel a blast. I also attended hacker news meetups in Chicago when those were a thing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Rinum 5y agoI've been playing around with that concept on https://vocalvoid.com https://vocalvoid.com Here's my Show HN for it, didn't get much attention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29486307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29486307
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI'd like something like HN in chat instead. Not a fan of audio. But IRC on Libera comes pretty close.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y agoIn my experience Clubhouse turned into a corpse merely a few weeks after its hype, after that it was just people parading this corpse around because what they saw in clubhouse was based on experiences a very small number of (other) people made on there. Those experiences were never inherent to clubhouse, but solely based on the limited amount of users, and a bit of curiosity among internet celebrities. Something that was never going to scale or keep up in any way. There are only so many incredible Harvard professors you can randomly meet at night to listen in on them having the most incredible discussion about life and the future. The moment I took a look (which was pretty early) it was already nothing but scams and spam. And celebrities of varying popularity selling stuff to their audiences. The google stats for "clubhouse" paint a picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=clubhouse https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=clubhouse
- yonixw 5y ago> There are only so many incredible Harvard professors I feel the same about TED
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y agoI never understood what's so special about TED. In my language segment of the internet it's always been portrayed as one of the things you'd learn English for. So I learned the language — more or less — and started watching it. Absolutely disappointing. The vast majority of presentations I've seen are a very light form of popular science — any decent book written by an actual scientist will serve you much better. It's usually a guy (or gal) clowning around before the audience and spending 40 minutes on a subject that can be summarized in two short paragraphs of text. Have I just been doing it wrong? are there any decent presentations out there?
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYeah I think TED talks are usually way too shallow. Videos in general really.. And they're generally pretty slow to make sure even the slowest person in the audience can keep up so it's pretty frustrating. I prefer written content over video most of the time. The only kind of presentations I like are the ones at hacker conferences. They tend to be for a highly technical audience and very non-commercial. Just about the tech, not trying to sell anything. You can find recordings on https://media.ccc.de https://media.ccc.de for example. They have a lot of German content but most of the event presentations are in English.
- PinguTS 5y agoYes, the Industrie40 club still has very interesting content. Its not the big rooms. Its the small rooms. There are not constantly available. You just need to find (active) clubs that are right for you and need to follow their content. With the (not so) new feature of reply, some of those content is available like a podcast. But, of course that is missing the point of participation.
- StephenJGL 5y agoSounds like Hipsterism via social platform. Not trying to be unecessarily insulting. Just trying to identify the value. Reintroducing fleeting, ephemeral, scarcity of accessibility but but not in an arbitrary formulaic way in large scale tech platforms is interesting. It is inherently the value of "I found the band" and "oh yeah I liked cream cheese avocado salad on macaroni toast" sorts of things though.
- thomasfromcdnjs 5y agoI've been using it regularly for 7 months, still love it. I have my internet stranger group of friends who are always around for chat. But also love listening to music rooms when I want to discover new stuff. Essentially I use it for radio as a socially deprived remote worker. I also created a bot that can talk and speak in rooms that leverages GPT-3 for a bit of fun -> https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/ https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/ There are Figma and live Javascript coding rooms, where everyone gets on and has open access to the same playgrounds. Get's chaotic but generally everyone self organizes. Nothing really compares to Agora/Clubhouse audio quality. Footnote: I am a "socialite" and love to talk to new people often. ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== Made a Clubhouse room -> https://www.clubhouse.com/room/MwrYA8YQ https://www.clubhouse.com/room/MwrYA8YQ Edit: Sitting in an empty room for 40 minutes now... proves the thread I suppose aha - will wait patiently Edit 2: Got 1 person so far Name a vegetable when you come up so I can kick non HN people. ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agothe phone number was always a bummer and https://kashmirlife.net/sleuths-silently-listen-to-clubhouse-reports-say-269735/ https://kashmirlife.net/sleuths-silently-listen-to-clubhouse... meant i could not willingly be a part of this but that's just me. instagram/snapchat folks seem to be liking it but not for some time as i have heard. the "euphoria" has kinda died as i had asked a few people who used to clock 14+hours in a single sitting.
- batirch 5y agoHey Thomas. I am that one person in the room. About the topic, glad that Clubhouse hype is over. There are niche communities around the world who are still actively using it. Also people who don't use Discord or other gaming apps are using it for live game chatting.
- thomasfromcdnjs 5y agoupdate: kind of at 5 hn peepz
- GrifMD 5y agoI've never really been a fan of synchronous online experiences, so I didn't jump on it. Even group video calls with friends can be tedious.
- DarthNebo 5y agoNever even bothered with it, they seemed to initially sound as if the missing features were some sort of advanced tech that was going to take a lot of time to build. When in fact they just weren't able to use Agora's SDK for Android properly. The weirdest thing is that they made it mobile app exclusive, for something which really does not need to be phone exclusive to begin with.
- jamil7 5y ago> The weirdest thing is that they made it mobile app exclusive, for something which really does not need to be phone exclusive to begin with They were both iOS developers as far as I remember and a lot of the code they already had from a few other social networks they'd tried.
- DarthNebo 5y agoMakes sense
- filmgirlcw 5y agoLol, no. I was in it from March or April of 2020 and I don't know if I've used it at all in 2021. I've used Twitter Spaces a few times, but Clubhouse is dead.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 4monthsaway 5y agoI was excited to try it relatively early on in its popularness spike. I spent I think 3 evenings walking around listening to multiple channels or whatever they're called. Nearly every one seemed to be a snakeoil sales pitch and I just got sickened by it. Deleted it after a week and never looked back.
- jasonsb 5y agoI don't use it, but I do enjoy some Twitter Spaces from time to time.
- ismail 5y agoI too stopped using it. Too much noise, very little signal. There were some interesting parts. Like listen for an hour to get an interesting perspective, story , viewpoint of 5 mins. It really depends on who was in the room, and the ability of the people on stage to stimulate interesting conversation.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNever managed to get an invite. Seems hard to scale your app and gain traction when interested people can’t even give it a go. I guess the elitism was part of the marketing.
- sidcool 5y agoI got my invite (when it was invite only), which was exciting as it felt exclusive. But soon I found that the rooms were mostly around Crypto, Get rich soon schemes. Only a few were truly interesting to me. And the notifications were nagging too. So I turned off the notifications. Soon, I found that I no longer needed the app. Finally uninstalled it. I think it was a pretty good idea. Not sure where it went awry.
- gigantecmedia 5y agosometimes, mostly for a16z events and local tech events (Vietnam & Southeast Asia). I don't understand and don't follow the hate (overhyped, overfunding, etc.) but I think the app is very smooth and works pretty well for me.
- shp0ngle 5y agowhat are some good tech events in vietnam? haven't seen many people since the reopening :)
- gigantecmedia 5y agoback then there were lots of virtual events from LAUNCH VIETNAM START UP club on Clubhouse, now I think they switch to Zoom events. you can find and join some from LinkedIn as well, like from Tech Founder Institute for crypto startups, or some Sequoia Surge events for Southeast Asia.
- simonswords82 5y agoNope - it was a total waste of time.
- jan_Inkepa 5y agoI had a week of using it regularly in the evening, including a few german rap battle evenings, which were genuinely amazing and felt really special. There was a special interest group of watch enthusiasts which I found really charming, and also some Pidgin-English rooms I found linguistically entertaining for a while. But I stopped eventually (the amount of crypto/get-rich-quick stuff that other mention was bad, but I'm not sure that wasn't the reason I left as such - there just wasn't enough non-get-rich-related stuff in the end), and haven't been back in six months. I hosted a room once, which I was really nervous about - I never really felt like I could participate in most of the rooms I was listening in on - there weren't many ins, and joining a voice-call is much harder than posting a message. I wonder if that barrier wasn't a big factor.
- deepsun 5y agoThe more interesting question is how they achieved such a great success in marketing opening? I'd like to learn from them.
- corobo 5y agoNever got an invite and now Twitter has stomped them
- petercooper 5y agoI enjoyed it early on (about a year ago) as it was novel and had this sort of "cosiness" to a lot of the chats. I stopped using it as much when my dad had a stroke in late January and I just wasn't in the mood.. but I've since returned a bit and it still isn't clicking for me anymore. A few ideas as to why: 1. A core group of speakers got addicted to it, tended to dominate many of the rooms, and appeared to know each other. So it got a bit samey and boring with them moderating everything. 2. A quantity vs quality dynamic seemed to appear in order to grow following counts and club sizes, which led to non stop lowest common denominator chats. I just went on now and this is clearly still a problem.. "Big Income Opportunities for You in 2022", "Real Relationship Talk", "Networking eLounge".. these sound like email spam subject lines. For me, these topics suck for the same reason on Clubhouse that they would if they were Ask HN topics.. There's probably more to it than that, and I might be being unfair, but those are just my initial gut answers.
- anyfactor 5y ago(Not related) At the time Clubhouse was being hyped in Twitter, a startup hired me as a growth engineer (read, social media manager). I went through tons of twitter threads of viral growth case studies. Everyone was so preachy about Clubhouse and Hey.com. They sold the idea that those were the greatest things ever to hit the startup space. The "invite only business with viral fame on twitter" felt like the only way to a sell startup in the 2020-21 era. Writing this comment now, I feel nothing but hate and bitterness for Twitter's hypocrisy in the dev/hacker circle there. Discovering a good idea or content worth value from twitter is like finding a needle in a bunch of needles.
- thrower123 5y agoEternal September comes for all exclusive services that try to grow wide. I thought Clubhouse was interesting, just because of how it speed-ran the Quora descent from high-quality, VIP-seeded experience, to absolute Yahoo Answers depravity once it opened up and the unwashed masses poured in.
- Tenoke 5y agoAs far as I could tell the hype was in large part driven by celebrity VCs like Naval and Balaji constantly hyping it as the next stage of social networking and that can only drive people to use it for so long. Numbers have been falling all year since then.
- tonetheman 5y agoI never could get an invite... nor could anyone I knew. At some point I quit paying attention. I think anyone can get in now.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Daunk 5y agoI had never even heard of it, and had to Google it find out what it was.
- bmcn2020 5y agoNot since Twitter introduced Spaces. Which seems to have killed Clubhouse.
- norswap 5y agoBold of you to assume I ever used it!
- ronenlh 5y agoI left Twitter because I got bored of the conversation, too much noise and irrelevant chatter. When I joined clubhouse I was disappointed to see the same people and chatter, and a lot of crypto everywhere. It also felt somewhat formal, I felt uncomfortable seeing myself as a listener in a square. It was ambiguous whether I was a passive listener or I had the possibility to be active. I have a thick accent so I prefer to communicate by chat.
- Graffur 5y agoNever used it. It seemed like yet another way for loud mouths to get their voice heard.
- pndy 5y agoI still don't get the whole idea behind Clubhouse - I've read it's modelled on some 80s-90s phone parties or something like this? All I know it's some kind of invite-exclusive voice chat
- doubtfuluser 5y agoThank you for reminding me of it. This caused me to delete my account there. I am no fan of apps that rely on synchronous experiences, and I also see much higher value in podcasts and their curation (having show notes to know in advance what is covered, being able to skip over uninteresting parts and the content is of higher quality because less spontaneous.
- cvhashim 5y agoIt was fun for a month but it started to feel like a waste of time. Didn’t see much value in it.
- wizwit999 5y agoTwitter is way better.