15 ms·

Is social audio already dead?

128 points by thm 4y ago

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Can’t think anyone who ever sat through it as a listener ever saw it going anywhere. It was like the worst possible parts of a podcast amplified 1000% with zero of the upsides. Just self-important low-talent bluechecks blowing smoke up each other in a self-promo-off.
zeruch 4y ago
"Is social audio already dead?" One can hope...
smt88 4y ago
Only the tiny minority of "very online" people ever thought it was mainstream in the first place.
- xnorswap 4y ago
  I'm a "very online" person and I've never heard of clubhouse outside of recent HN articles.
  - ditsuke 4y ago
    Not very online enough. But really, i think it's more about your online influence sphere. I've been on the intersection and seen a side where it's big, the other where it's not even felt.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    I'm not "very online" at all and I felt like I heard about Clubhouse constantly when it launched.
    - smt88 4y ago
      From mainstream media looking for trends, or from people you knew who used it?
      - jaywalk 4y ago
        Mostly from the media. I only know a handful of people who even tried it out.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    I think you had to be very on Twitter and probably following people at least adjacent to VC
hunglee2 4y ago
$4 Billion acquisition talks with Twitter is going to be revealed as the mother of lost opportunity
rvz 4y ago
Yes. I'm still struggling for anyone to give me a concrete answer as to why Clubhouse is worth $4B or even $1B at the time. [0] Monetisation-wise, Clubhouse looks like a solution, looking for a problem via hair-splitting a niche which already has been solved 'generally' by everyone else. It is not early days and Clubhouse looks like it is going to either shutdown or get acquired in the next 5 years. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362
dannyw 4y ago
The Android version is still incredibly buggy and borderline unusable, one year in.
seydor 4y ago
I think the whole trend started because some vcs thought that their own voices were important and needed to be heard. Looked like a vanity sector overall
- luc_ 4y ago
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Just like the short-lived social olfactory trend started because some vcs thought their shit didn't stink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    Nobody would put the smell of shit over a picture of anything. Electronic olfactory stimulation would cement marketing associations for children aged 0-12. If somebody ever figured out the technical side of delivering smells affordable and instantly, he/she would have subtle influence over people years after they are exposed to the initial entertainment product that built an association and memory in the child.
    - TameAntelope 4y ago
      I take it you haven't heard of Prolitec[0]. Olfactory memory is exceptionally strong[1], and if a marketer could successfully tap into it, I imagine very positive outcomes. [0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-ambient-scenting-for-the-retail-market/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-ambien... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory
  - nix0n 4y ago
    I thought you were posting April Fools articles until I saw the YYYY/MM part of the Wired URL.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Clubhouse was unfortunate to come about in the crypto boom. lots of inate crypto chat on there.
- schlupfknoten 4y ago
  Seems to affect Twitter as well. Every time I've checked out the Spaces tab in the app, the featured Spaces were 90% NFT / crypto promotion.
- Uehreka 4y ago
  Yeah, but that’s just one part of its local maximum. If crypto didn’t exist, I feel confident the hustle porn, personal finance and entrepreneurship stuff (more “How I Make $1000/mo In Passive Income”-style content and less Startup School) would rush to fill the gap.
  - drannex 4y ago
    At the very least that would be marginally tenable to deal with and would have /some/ sort of variety to the conversation.
- lmm 4y ago
  On the contrary, I suspect it wouldn't have enjoyed what success it had without being able to lean on some very monetary FOMO.
- fullshark 4y ago
  The main people interested in talking to large groups of strangers are selling something, if not crypto boom it would be something else.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Or perhaps the crypto boom made it popular in a way which it would never be in the first place? Crypto at least gave it a chance.
rco8786 4y ago
The problem, IMO, is the “live” nature of things like Clubhouse/Spaces. Your audience has to be actively engaged at the right moment to get distribution, and even then you’re subject to the randomness that is live content. No ability to edit the boring parts out or add production value. Something that is like Twitter for Podcasts would be interesting I think. 1-5 minute audio clips designed to be consumed asynchronously, presented in a sort of timeline manner where you could feasibly just hit play and listen for 30m, getting quick hit audio content from 5-10 creators Imagine informative YouTube videos but without the “what’s up guys in this video we’re …blah blah” sort of fluff. Just straight to the point.
- bilekas 4y ago
  "A quick message from our sponsor before we get to the video - RAID shadow legends!"
  - 0des 4y ago
    Do you cry sometimes? Borrow checker got you down? Try BetterHelp!
- vyrotek 4y ago
  If you mix the creators into a single timeline that sorts of turns it into a voice-only TikTok. I've been toying with an idea that's more of an async version of the Marco Polo app but for podcast-type content. Async bites of a single podcast episode which may involve one or more contributors continuously adding to the episode/discussion. Does anything like either of these exist already?
emptyfile 4y ago
Fascinating. I read the entire article without learning what social audio or Clubhouse are.
- dan1234 4y ago
  I would say it’s probably closest to a ‘live podcast’.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    So... unscheduled radio talk show? The obvious competitors are: - scheduled radio talk show. They may be inane but they're professional and consistent - recorded podcast: has the major advantages of being listenable on your own schedule and possibly well-edited - youtube: same as podcast, but with video as well - youtube live: the chat allows more people to participate simultaneously than folks trying to get airtime - discord: it's live and you might even know or get to know all the participants That's a lot of competition and not much in visible advantages
self_awareness 4y ago
Well I wanted to register and use it, but registration was closed. I've subscribed to be notified when the registration will be open again, but notification never came. Later I forgot about it completely.
- throwk8s 4y ago
  I never registered for Clubhouse, and forgot about it so completely I can't remember why I wasn't interested. There was a reason but I forgot what it was. In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I don't see how anyone can build a business on only this type of content, it's too synchronous.
petercooper 4y ago
I am a "very online" industry analyst type and I enjoyed listening to a lot of Clubhouse chats in late 2020. It wasn't all nonsense - there was value to be had, particularly around gathering current thoughts and, sometimes, inside baseball on various topics, technologies or companies, but you had to listen to a lot to get any gold. Podcasts are far more efficient if you're in a sector that has some good ones and if you really want to chat yourself, you'd probably do better to just create your own podcast or attend some networking events. That said, Twitter is a slightly different kettle of fish. Some of the live OSINT spaces around the invasion of Ukraine were hours ahead of mainstream media and did some amazing work earlier this year. Smaller community groups also seem able to use them productively to organize in a way that Clubhouse didn't seem to allow, perhaps because people already have social graphs on Twitter.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Part of it is the synchronous-asynchronous difference. Clubhouse requires you to be logged in and listening throughout the whole discourse, most other forms of "social media" (Twitter, Facebook, forums, ...) let you drop in and out. Clubhouse also fails to scale because only one person can be talking at a time. As the number of people in a room N increases, this becomes an increasing limitation... One of those that any software developer should have been able to tell you about ahead of time. That's a serious enough scaling problem on it's own but socially some people are real blowhards who never quit talking while other people are more like https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness and that is all complicated by social dynamics, gender, class, race, hierarchies, power relationships, etc. That OSINT group for instance with N people could have an output proportional to O(N) if there is no need for coordination between the people, but if everyone is paying full attention to the discussion it is only going to have O(1) productivity.
  - Mixtape 4y ago
    With regard to the output productivity of the conversation, there's also something to be said about the "narrative control" that limiting speaking to a single person at a time brings. With voice platforms (including things like Discord, Zoom, etc.), there's always one thread of conversation going on. The meeting is generally a point A to point B discourse where circling back to examine a topic further is awkward and destroys the overall flow. People want to avoid that, so anyone who can manage to dominate the conversation and stop other people from interjecting has the power to effectively manage what comes next. There's a lot of potentially valuable conversations that get lost along the way as a result. As an aside, I've seen this bleeding into real-world conversations over the past few years as well. Pre- and post-COVID conversations with my peers in college were staunchly different in how they handled side conversations. Perhaps it's just a product of my cohort getting older and more accustomed to the norms of professional communication, but I've noticed far fewer productive side conversations in groups of roughly 7 or more and a much stronger focus on "staying on-topic". Text-based platforms have long since managed this issue with reply-based systems, threads, and hierarchical, nested conversations (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc.). This is really only possible asynchronously, though. In a voice format, the best you can do is leave to a breakout room or other channel and come back when you're done, but in doing so you're missing out on the conversation in the main thread. Unless we can somehow find a way to work past that limitation, I'm convinced that practically any platform that relies entirely on voice is going to fail to have the reach and community-building effect that something like Discord or Reddit has achieved. Additionally, all of this also fails to consider the fact that synchronous-only voice is yet another social distractor that demands your attention on someone's terms other than your own. As seems to be the sentiment on HN, I'm pretty staunchly opposed to normalizing yet another consumer of my time as necessary for social acceptance, but perhaps I'm a bad sample of the public opinion. Apologies if I repeated a bit of what you said here, but the point I'm trying to make is that you're entirely right about the obviousness of this issue. It doesn't take much consideration of the concept to realize that there's an immediate growth problem. Novel as the idea behind social audio might have been, it was doomed from the figurative (and literal) word one.
outsidetheparty 4y ago
One overvalued flash in the pan does not constitute a trend.
marban 4y ago
- Instant uninterestingness - No slot machine psychology and adhocracy - Low information density inflates usage time - Vanity barrier between speakers and listeners - No evergreen content / Indexability
herunan 4y ago
It’s not dead. It was popular because of it’s novelty, and now it’s just another form of communication or content consumption. Unfortunately for Clubhouse, that means that as soon as big social networks copy you, you need to innovate or die. Network effects of bigger social media are too powerful for Clubhouse, so it’s a bit of an unfair fight.
- can16358p 4y ago
  But is there any momentum in the big-network-copycats anyway? I believe it's not about Clubhouse in particular, but the whole idea, so even if Facebook copies it, it's still a dead-end (but would still do in order to dominate the space and keep users in).
can16358p 4y ago
I always thought the idea of Clubhouse was just a boring hype and deleted the app within 24h of starting to use it. Always thought it was just me. Apparently it really was a hype. At least in that form of it.
- Thlom 4y ago
  Everyone except some terminally online journalists and social media "experts" understood this was a hype and a stupid product doomed to fail.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    VCs were pumping this hard. Journalists wouldn't have cared if Musk and other famous people weren't popping in during the initial hype phase.
mgamache 4y ago
Dead? No. But it's not the wildly popular service that people thought it would be. Clubhouse is mostly a dumpster fire. Someone might figure out the right way to do it, but right now it's a clunky mess of toxic rooms with the occasional substantive conversation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throw457 4y ago
Someone should tell them about discord.
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  and mumble, vent, xfire, teamspeak. Social audio isn't dead, it's one of the most consistently good aspects of technology because these idiots haven't figured out how to ruin it by trying to monetize the social aspects of it. I've spent my evening in a voice chat for the last 20 years, it's a solved problem.
jimkleiber 4y ago
For me, Clubhouse went from an exclusive party of real-name people I wanted to meet to an open party with lots of pseudonymous/anonymous accounts. Especially on a live social audio platform, which requires so much of my attention, I wanted to know who I was talking to and be excited to meet them, and that became harder and harder.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
>Is social audio already dead? The general rule of thumb, is that any headline that ends in a question mark is answered by "no," but I think that this one is "yes." Clubhouse, Marco Polo, etc. have not been very compelling; for different reasons. I think Clubhouse couldn't compete with video broadcast media, like TikTok, and Marco Polo also couldn't, but because it is one-to-one, without social "scoring." Also, the Clubhouse app wasn't very good, and was iOS-only. I think that it’s a good example of one that should probably have been done via a hybrid system. I think that, if we will release a native platform app, it needs to be absolutely top-Quality. No compromises. That's the case for the app I'm writing now.
- tjoff 4y ago
  For it to be dead, must it not have been alive first? From my perspective it clearly was not.
- martin_a 4y ago
  > and was iOS-only. I think that was a feature not a bug. Strengthened the FOMO.
sklargh 4y ago
What prevented Clubhouse from quickly devolving into an ersatz Discord. I feel like the audio chat capability + community management was already there.
- xnyan 4y ago
  For one, iOS only is a non-starter.
zthrowaway 4y ago
Wasn’t clubhouse taken over by political activists? I recall something like that contributing to its downfall.
ppeetteerr 4y ago
It took only a moment to realize that Social Audio is about as healthy as Instagram: it's groups of people promoting themselves. If you want to have a call with your friends, that already exists. If you want legitimate information, you have podcasts. There are conferences, panels, etc. Clubhouse got the hype right, but the "market fit" wrong.
rullopat 4y ago
Social audio has the same problem of an audio message: it comes always in the moment you cannot listen to it. Even worse, a message from a friend or relative has much bigger priority.
madmax108 4y ago
I feel like Clubhouse fell bang in the "This is a feature, not a product" [1] hole and have simply not been able to get out of it, esp once other apps came up with their own live-audio functionality (and given how Twitter and Clubhouse were very closely entwined, the launch of Twitter Spaces and Twitter pushing it quite aggressively was probably the nail in the coffin). Honestly though, I always felt like live audio was just a pandemic-era overhyped field[2] which still needs a few years in the sun before becoming ready for primetime, because the current implementations do not really bring anything fresh (or useful imo) to the table that other forms of communication don't bring with them (be it Youtube livestreams or podcasts or whatnot) [1] https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-in-venture-are-you-a-product-or-feature https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-in-v... [2] And it's not just limited to Clubhouse, but also region specific apps like Leher (https://leher.app/ https://leher.app/) which pivoted from social audio to some weird "do tasks to earn money" model
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  When your primary means of user acquisition is via somebody else's social network then this will always happen. Clubhouse built a neat little feature and then tried to leverage Twitter to get people to use it. But then Twitter just built it themselves and took all the lunch money. This has happened numerous times. Another high-profile example was Meerkat/Periscope. The best you can hope for is to be acquired/acqui-hired by said social network a la Periscope. But that's very rare.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  It's definitely a feature, not a product. I've listened to a few of the live discussions on Twitter between experts in the Ukraine War (e.g. Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were in it), and definitely found that worthwhile. It was, essentially, a live podcast, that took some live questions. So unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I do think it has some value and isn't just for VCs' vanity, but it also just feels like a feature. I would never go out of my way to a site that only does this, but when I see a notification of a live stream when I'm already using Twitter, and the subject sounds interesting, I might join.
- 4y ago
mikewarot 4y ago
Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans talk at the same time. Podcasts are a form of social audio that scales well. Anything that lets someone talk 1:1 with their fans is going to have to have a rate throttling mechanism. For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-announced appearances, etc. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Ding ding ding!!! This. There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard. The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem. The hard one is feedback at scale. There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising. It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost. In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations. Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense: - Lectio: the reading to be considered. - Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read. - Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr... These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.
Chris86 4y ago
I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Not necessarily deliberate, but that general flavour of startup that investors hoped to massive inflate and grab market share, with the expectation that there is some early mover advantage to be had in a new category. But because they were only manufacturing demand, rather than creating something people really wanted, it's just not worked out.
- rvz 4y ago
  > I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Attempted* quick pump and dump. They tried to get Twitter to acquire it for $4B and that failed so they are now scrambling to make money or make it worthy of an IPO. Since either outcome is unlikely, they are most likely to do a down-round with more layoffs as a consequence and probably close down in the next 5 years.
Havoc 4y ago
Was never alive. Only reason clubhouse thrived briefly was artificial constraints to create an aura of exclusivity
jsonne 4y ago
It's not dead it just got effectively integrated into existing networks like Twitter. I love spaces! I think there will be more innovation in the future with social audio but clubhouse felt like a flash in the pan to be sure.
CedarMills 4y ago
I was an early Clubhouse user. The initial conversations were very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other. It basically turned into an audio version of Twitter. After a couple of months, I ended up deleting the application. My wife uses Marco Polo a lot with her family. It's a great way for them to maintain an async conversation. I think for group no larger than five people, it makes a lot of sense. Is social audio dead? No. I do think that the market size is definitely a lot smaller.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > The initial conversations were very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other. Eternal September all over again.
Finnucane 4y ago
Never actually tried it. From the descriptions I saw, it seemed like it would be like Twitter, but with actual yelling. Who would want that? Maybe the real product was better than that, but it didn't seem like a lot of incentive to try.
- mcintyre1994 4y ago
  I never used Clubhouse, but most Twitter Spaces aren't really like that. The reason is because unlike normal Twitter only a limited number of people are speakers, and you have to be selected by the host to speak. It's more like niche panel shows with a live audience, and sometimes Q+A with people being selected from the audience to ask a question.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    but what advantage does that have against podcasts when you can't participate unless you know the host? I could just listen to a conversation that's been recorded and get the same benefit, without having to schedule a live conversation I can't take part in. I don't see the draw over a podcast style show. Most live audience questions suck.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Claude_Shannon 4y ago
This was the first time I've ever heard of this term. I'm still not sure what it is exactly.
- eganist 4y ago
  Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces (possibly deprecated), Spotify Live are three of the biggest. Apparently Twitter had been in talks to acquire Clubhouse for $4bil. Hindsight is 20/20.
system16 4y ago
I got an invite when it started blowing up and gave it an honest try. Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves to each other, and the conversations were comically similar: - Start off by validating what a great community this is and how great and positive everyone is. - Story time: either a huge challenge they overcame to become the great success they are today, or trying to make the most basic common sense sound like some insightful breakthrough. - Repeat a few times, and then someone will "reset the room" and start over again. I couldn't help but laugh because I honestly couldn't believe it wasn't a parody.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  This tangentially reminds me of a shameless puff piece on one of the financial networks about a startup lead by a "self-made man" who invested part of his trust fund into his business and whose father, worth over $250M at the time, was a major investor.
- alx__ 4y ago
  The few rooms I found on Clubhouse that were interesting had a theme of reading bedtime/sleep stories. Which is essentially a live podcast to put you to sleep
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I would expect to get trolled in rooms like that; it just sounds too contrived to not be a troll. Calm gentle voice interrupted by loud screams just as you were about to fall asleep, things like that.
- chasing 4y ago
  Agreed. Best case experiences were in rooms that felt like mid-tier tech conference panels. Clubhouse could've leaned into the above idea and really figured it out. Like, how do you mix the experience of a live in-person panel of experts and also leverage asynchrony across space and time... Maybe there would've been something there. But as it stood, it felt like it hit the jackpot with a clever idea and a bunch of hype but never actually solved any of the hard problems that might turn it into something real.
pjmlp 4y ago
For me it never started, as I never got the point of them. They seemed to evolve into another kind of TED talks, but even without trying to do anything quality wise in proper content.
rg111 4y ago
Social audio is not dead. It existed for decades, and it was known as... conference call. Before internet, we used conference calls in our friends circle and among relatives, a lot. Now we do a group call in Meet or Telegram. And Discord has a lot of very active social voice in many channels. Data is so cheap in so many places, people often just opt for video. But what many people still prefer is just audio calls. Social audio is not dead. What is dead is Clubhouse who were stupid enough to believe that hype alone could cause growth and made normies beg or pay for invites. And who only released an app for a platform that is practically non-existent outside oof the US and the EU.
tjpnz 4y ago
At a previous company I attended regular team lunches with a particularly obnoxious colleague. It wasn't that he was a bad guy, just a snob who liked the sound of his own voice and talking over people with his pseudo intellectual rantings and ravings. Clubhouse replicates that experience almost too well. The only thing missing is the food and the obligation to be present.
Alacart 4y ago
Despite many knocking it here, I think there's at least one significant aspect of the clubhouse/twitter spaces/etc. model of audio chat: the much stronger feeling of connection that people get from being able to literally speak to the big personalities in whatever their area of interest is. we can debate whether that's good or bad, scalable, a feature or a product. But I think it's undeniable that the emotional dopamine hit people get from that are a lot higher than getting any kind of async response, especially text. It makes it feel much more real. Even if you don't interact at all and just listen, it feels like you're an insider, you've made it into the club, and you could speak up. Like you practically know <insert names>, you were on a call with them earlier today! That kind of interaction I think we might see a lot more of as a feature for e.g. streaming platforms. People crave it.
- na85 4y ago
  That's exactly what their value prop was. Normies get a chance to feel like they're friends with famous people. It's social status signalling as a service.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Was it ever particularly alive in the mainstream? Can't say I ever encountered anybody other than marketers/talking heads/influencers who were into it.
- randomdata 4y ago
  This is the first I have ever heard of it, so I'm guessing not.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
AlexandrB 4y ago
Does this site go into an endless reload loop for anyone else? I wonder if it's my content blockers or something else...
dayvid 4y ago
I think only 1-2 clubhouses I listened to were any good. It was gamed by opportunists and grifters lightning fast. Lots of noise with very little signal. I would enjoy it and Twitter spaces more if they supported replay w/ 2x speed, skipping over or only playing certain speakers, or some sort of auto-tagging on topics so you can skip to what's interesting.
mikhmha 4y ago
Social audio isn’t dead - I see it becoming a more prominent feature on existing social networks. Never used or heard about Clubhouse when it came out but recently I’ve been using Twitter spaces and I’ve found it to be very valuable. In financial twitter I’ve joined spaces with some great discussion that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. Big part of it is the drop-in drop-out nature of it. So you’ll have analysts from different sectors joining a space to offer their 2cents and ask really great questions. Really all you need to do is @ a blue checkmark and there is a high chance they will join to weigh in. I can see LinkedIn adding a feature like this in the future - though I think LinkedIn spaces would be terrible (insane amount of self-promotion ugh). Reddit is already testing it.
joshstrange 4y ago
I got an invite but never signed up, it always felt like "podcasts but worse". I mean sure, there was the opportunity to interact in the audience but I really dislike "forced-realtime" anything. Also the chances that people I look up and respect were on ClubHouse (or similar), at a time I was free, talking about something I had input on, and (most importantly) wanted input from the audience were about 0.
- gregmac 4y ago
  > it always felt like "podcasts but worse". Even without the live/realtime aspect, I think it can be summed up by: > I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. > - Blaise Pascal I don't want to listen to a rambling, un-edited conversation that might be good and/or interesting, I want to listen to a well thought-out talk that is good and interesting, and is only exactly as long as it needs to be. Edited and/or curated podcasts (or videos) are simply a better avenue for that.
Fede_V 4y ago
Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse a grand total of 3x before never turning it on. I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics, history, etc.. Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes, so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way tethered to their concrete achievements.
- rchaud 4y ago
  But that begs the question: why would anyone of note use Clubhouse, if not as an continuation of the mostly "one-way megaphone" strategy that made them big on Twitter or elsewhere?
testmasterflex 4y ago
Was always dead since there was no way prior to a conversation possible to assess the quality of it. Unless you are playing/horsing around, who’s willing to play the lottery with their time like that?
wolframhempel 4y ago
I'm currently working on a social Audio take tied into podcasting (which is very much alive). The idea is to have live podcasting a la Twitch or YouTube live, including chat and tipping. You can also invite other people to record the show with and even bring in members from the audience. At the end, it let's you download everything as Mp3 for post editing and publishing as a podcast. The live discussion will remain open as part of https://podbabble.com https://podbabble.com. The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed.
- macspoofing 4y ago
  >The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed. And how is that theory proving up?
  - wolframhempel 4y ago
    Dunno, not released yet :-)
kristiandupont 4y ago
This reminded me of this absolutely hilarious Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913 https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913 >Emily wants to know about the future. Are the rumors true? Will you add VIDEO to clubhouse?? >You pause dramatically. >... "Video is a bug, not a feature" >Boom. F*cking Nailed It
- gregmac 4y ago
  This thread is really good, some key points I took: > But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW. > Your engineers [..] warn you: multiplying "content is interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder. > You rebuttle: "Well - Twitch figured out how to do this! Twitch is live content - so clearly it's possible!" > 1 - twitch creators are live ~40 hours a week. Our best creators do weekly shows. ~3-4 hrs a week max. The game makes content creation easier > 2 -Twitch is vertically focused (gaming). Clubhouse is horizontal. You need "great content" across EVERY category. ... > Creators with big audience (proven good content) don't want to switch platforms. Spend an hour "live" on clubhouse reaching 2,000 people... or do a podcast and reach 200,000?
- macspoofing 4y ago
  That thread is awesome. Prescient too.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Reading this Twitter thread made me wonder if the future of Clubhouse is in the business sector. My company has monthly "all hands" meetings where the C-levels dog and pony about what's coming up. Using Zoom for this was OK when everyone was working across two time zones. But in the COVID era we're spread out across many more. If Clubhouse could come up with a super-easy and super-attractive way for businesses to time-shift this content, it could find paying subscribers. Something along the lines of "Listen (Watch?) the leaders at 10:00amET, or the replays at 10:00amPT, or 9:00amGMT." Recorded, but with the appointment urgency of live. I know that many tools like Zoom or Teams have the ability to record the video for people to consume later, but from what I've heard from the people in the HR department, it's either complicated, or time-consuming, or both. And for people who are more audio-focused, many times that's a better way to go.
me_me_mu_mu 4y ago
Most rooms were just self absorbed narcissistic people talking to each other. “Social” anything is a wasteland. Just build useful tools that help people do things, like buy plane tickets.
macspoofing 4y ago
Maybe it's dead in the way Vine (Twitter) was, until TikTok came in and took over the social media space. There is a use-case for social audio but it may need some refinement.
LegitShady 4y ago
clubhouse doesn't scale because the more people are talking, the less you can tell which conversation is important or matters. The success of clubhouse is its own destruction.
wolverine876 4y ago
Is there a description of the cycle that failed products or innovations go through? For successful ones, there's, First, they laugh at you, Then, they tell you it's not in the orthodoxy, Then they tell you they knew it all along. As trite and simplistic as that is, I find it to be a reliable prediction; I think what it really reflects is an instinct to resist change, to unconsciously follow the status quo. By the last stage, the innovation becomes the status quo and it's sincere in one way: the people who 'knew it all along' truly followed the status quo all along. What is the cycle for failed innovations? An end stage is schadenfreude. In fact, the end stage is exactly the same: They 'knew' all along that it would fail, it just has some schadenfreude added. All the stages may be the same. If someone predicts every challenging innovation will fail, they'll usually be right! And regardless, they are sticking with the status quo throughout.
boringg 4y ago
I feel like clubhouse is A16z's greatest expected to be success flop. They invested heavily into this app both time, clout and money. Not that I think VCs are able to see the future but they do uptalk the vantage point they have being able to see the bleeding edge in live time. This one shows that even with the advantage that they didn't see it with the right perspective. FWIW I really enjoyed in the early days when there were certain people on platform. After a bit it became dilutive in content quality and it sadly seemed more like hucksters on platform. If Clubhouse has done a post mortem on how they didn't convert their insane growth - I wager it was that they didn't screen quality.
- ls612 4y ago
  Clubhouse grew during the pandemic when some people needed to signal to others that they weren't meeting in person. Once that need fell away it started dying.
zbuf 4y ago
Most of Clubhouse was a vacuum of hot garbage, but this medium _can_ be great. It was interesting to experience a really great example of social audio -- as a guest on a "show" for blind and low vision podcasters. The perfect use of the perfect medium, I think. The differentiator was the work and preparation done by the host. But that doesn't make this a completely new medium -- all of the traditional elements of a live radio programme were there; a great host (who keeps things moving), organised guests in advance, and a community with Q&As from the audience members. What was new was the tooling, and the ability for such an extensive show to be made in software and operated by one person (and a blind one at that). https://the-blind-podmaker.pinecast.co/episode/df71fa32/blind-podcasters-roundtable-for-7-june-2021 https://the-blind-podmaker.pinecast.co/episode/df71fa32/blin...
blululu 4y ago
I am a bit disappointed that discussions of audio based social media is basically limited to Clubhouse. Personally I really enjoyed using Dialup. I joined in ~2019 and it was a great place to have real conversations with total strangers. During the quarantines it was one of the best windows I had into the broader world. Having an intimate conversation with a total stranger is a totally novel form of human interaction and I personally had a lot of good experiences with the service, even though it received none of the massive VC backed hype and media accolades. Personally I think that the problem with clubhouse and its competitor clones is more about how they structured conversations and less about social audio as a medium.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
goopthink 4y ago
Using Clubhouse as the end-all for social audio does the "space" a disservice, IMO. I used Clubhouse early on and it fell squarely into every single trope and commentary that everyone here is posting about it. Much later, I was introduced to "Cappuccino" [1], a social audio app that couldn't be more different from Clubhouse. It's slow-social (you only get updates once day (the cappuccino composed of 'beans' that everyone submits). Each audio update is capped at 3 minutes (though you can submit as many as you'd like), and you can attach a photo if you'd like. The app auto-adds some generic intro/outtro music and production cleanup and combines it into a single podcast-like update. I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of friends. The audio-first approach makes it easy to just talk about something (an idea, a life update) for a few moments (low cost to participate). The production value and once-a-day update makes it feel like a nice 'ritual' to receive everyone's updates. The intentionally asyncronousness emphasizes listening and thoughtfulness against trying to hop on to a comment thread. It honestly feels like sending postcards/letters out to folks... but audio. Can you do this as an audio group text? Kind of, yes. But that's like saying "you can recreate instagram by sending photos over whatsapp." Yes, but that misses the point. I'm not affiliated in any way with them but I think they're a very neat counterpoint to Clubhouse in terms of "social audio" (and slow vs fast social). [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cappuccino-stay-in-touch/id1506849927 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cappuccino-stay-in-touch/id150...
- soneca 4y ago
  > ” I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of friends” Would people listen to these small updates? Audio is pretty big in WhatsApp. But it’s widely accepted that audio messages are good for people who send it and bad for who receive (it is a hassle to listen to it, even at 2x, comparing to reading a text message). Also, your use case seems very well covered by WhatsApp and Telegram. I am part of a Telegram from a famous writer where he only sends audio messages (one-to-many, closed threads, only accepts emojis). It is hard to differentiate a product enough as an audio only social network to beat Telegram and WhatsApp on most use cases.
  - Flimm 4y ago
krnlpnc 4y ago
I hope so. It's a very wasteful and low resolution way to share information. We've had telephones and group calls since before we had computers, and there is a reason why we shifted to text. Plus the platform is inherently not accessibility friendly. It just makes no sense overall, but I can see why it was quick burning fad.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  On the contrary, voice is too high resolution. Live and interactive, with no video to distract, makes it immediately obvious when someone is bullshitting you, compared to text (especially 140char limited) or pre-recorded videos/podcasts. The only thing clubhouse would be worth for is improv comedy, but there are not enough good troupes.
  - krnlpnc 4y ago
    On the other hand voice is half duplex, transfers data slowly and doesn’t retransmit lost fragments. Agree to disagree I guess.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I didn't even know it was sick.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Good riddance. I hope a16z lost a lot of money.
acjohnson55 4y ago
They tried the classic strategy of making it invite-only (and iPhone-only) at first, and while this did work initially, I think it also established a culture of elitism that made me never want to install the app. That and I'm busy. I don't have time for appointment listening.
diebeforei485 4y ago
Twitter Spaces is actually a reasonably good product. I heard that Twitter offered to acquire Clubhouse but Clubhouse turned them down - that was a bad decision.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
No, it's alive and well, you just aren't invited. You can't engineer or buy access into communities that you are not cool enough to be a part of. If you do somehow manage it, the core people who made the community cool before you showed up will quickly move elsewhere SV nerds gotta stop trying to invite themselves to cool people parties, it's cringe. Accept your limitations as well as your strengths. Accept that real membership in those communities has a price that you are not actually willing and/or able to pay
jononomo 4y ago
I like Callin — I listen to Wes Yang and Jesse Singal on there. It seems like every show has a technical glitch or a user who doesn’t understand muting/unmuting, but overall I like it.
baryphonic 4y ago
A lot of the comments here are saying that Clubhouse is a lot of noise and very little signal. I largely agree that's what did it in, but I think I joined right before it hit that growth inflection point, and I was able to find something of a community until everyone kind of gave up. One night I had a discussion with a guy who had protested at Tiananmen Square in 1989, then went back to his university the day before the tanks rolled in. Later, he emigrated to the US. I met and befriended another guy who lived in Austin and was giving updates about the then-current Texas freeze. He was loosely connected to some of the folks behind NumPy/Anaconda, and so I got to spend several nights hanging out with them, which was pretty interesting. The biggest problem was always search/reputation (judging from my re-opening of the app for the first time in months, this is still the biggest problem). It was always gamed by "influencer" types, whose number one skill was glomming onto the New Hotness/Current Thing. Usually when opening the app, I'd need to scroll through one or two screen lengths of junk (e.g. "chat w/ [retired pro athlete] NFTs!!!", "be your own record label!!!") to find a topic that seemed remotely interesting. Filtering was (is?) hot garbage until I was following around 50 active users. The product people never realized that the truly influential people who were interesting were not on Clubhouse 16 hours a day, but would be on for an hour or two; the rest of the time, they were honing their craft at something outside of influencer culture. The other major problem was notification fatigue. I went through a phase of intense work on a side project, and didn't have time for Clubhouse very often. The app had some bug where it wouldn't respect my relatively spartan notification preferences, and was pinging me all the time, so I just disabled them altogether. A couple months later, I realized I had not been in there for a while, and when I logged in, few of the people I had connected with were still active (this was around a year ago). Ultimately, I think Clubhouse was an idea that in its current implementation could only exist during the pandemic. That being said, at times it felt like YouTube did back in '06 or Twitter in 2010: you could connect with anyone and learn about nearly any topic with a bit of dedication. Unlike a lot of the social networking experiences these days, it truly felt like there was a chance to meet someone who in the regular course of life you'd never get to meet.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
filereaper 4y ago
I've been enjoying Callin: https://www.callin.com/ https://www.callin.com/ Its not as crowded as Clubhouse and all the low signal to noise hustlers aren't there (yet). There's a few podcasts that are getting traction. Pull Request: Had the Paypal Mafia over and Emil Micheal talked about Super Pumped tv series. The hosts may have differing opinions and political views though, so might not be for everybody.
sethkim 4y ago
I actually built something in this space in the last two years called roundtable.audio (https://roundtable.audio/ https://roundtable.audio/). I actually also created an HN extension found here: https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/ https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/. See this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26856883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26856883. I've thought about it quite bit, and I think one of the long-term strategies to revive the space is having live-audio conversations attached to specific news articles, tweets, and other places on the web which prompt discussion. I also considered creating a chrome extension at one point which allows someone visiting an arbitrary webpage to be able to audio chat with those who are also on the same page. I'm planning on shutting down the deployment for roundtable.audio in the coming months, so if anyone wants to take these projects and run with them, I'd be happy to chat about how to collaborate or hand things over. The repo is open-source as well, but I'd certainly like to hear what you plan on doing with it or how I can help!
bborud 4y ago
I’m surprised Clubhouse is still around. I gave it a try as a way to have informal discussion with friends, former colleagues etc. I also tried to listen to a few events, but as other people have pointed out, one could be forgiven for thinking it was satire. What made me uninstall the app and forget about the service was the sleazy grabbing at my contact list and that Clubhouse came across as completely insincere. The image Clubhouse quickly acquired here in Norway was as a service for gullible suckers.
pixel_tracing 4y ago
I tried clubhouse and I remember when I lost interest. I had joined a room full of people discussing cryptocurrencies (more than 500 people). I mistakingly thought it was an open forum to discuss the technology. After being picked to ask a question, I asked the “thought leaders” of the group whether or not the technology itself made sense, or you could just utilize a singular (centralized) database to solve some of the problems some currencies are proposing to solve. Also the fact that computational power is wasted on hashing. I was instantly called a “shill”, creating “FUD.” In fact I didn’t even get to finish to finish my question and I was muted and called a “motherfucker.” Yea. I have no respect for that app anymore.
ramoz 4y ago
Clubhouse was really fun and interesting around Feb 2021. Then they started rolling out the “Creator” crap, and tbh their overemphasis and product development around cultures was a turn off.

128 points by thm 4y ago

Can’t think anyone who ever sat through it as a listener ever saw it going anywhere. It was like the worst possible parts of a podcast amplified 1000% with zero of the upsides. Just self-important low-talent bluechecks blowing smoke up each other in a self-promo-off.

zeruch 4y ago

"Is social audio already dead?" One can hope...

smt88 4y ago

Only the tiny minority of "very online" people ever thought it was mainstream in the first place.

xnorswap 4y ago
I'm a "very online" person and I've never heard of clubhouse outside of recent HN articles.
- ditsuke 4y ago
  Not very online enough. But really, i think it's more about your online influence sphere. I've been on the intersection and seen a side where it's big, the other where it's not even felt.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  I'm not "very online" at all and I felt like I heard about Clubhouse constantly when it launched.
  - smt88 4y ago
    From mainstream media looking for trends, or from people you knew who used it?
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      Mostly from the media. I only know a handful of people who even tried it out.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  I think you had to be very on Twitter and probably following people at least adjacent to VC

hunglee2 4y ago

$4 Billion acquisition talks with Twitter is going to be revealed as the mother of lost opportunity

rvz 4y ago

Yes. I'm still struggling for anyone to give me a concrete answer as to why Clubhouse is worth $4B or even $1B at the time. [0] Monetisation-wise, Clubhouse looks like a solution, looking for a problem via hair-splitting a niche which already has been solved 'generally' by everyone else. It is not early days and Clubhouse looks like it is going to either shutdown or get acquired in the next 5 years. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362

dannyw 4y ago

The Android version is still incredibly buggy and borderline unusable, one year in.

seydor 4y ago

I think the whole trend started because some vcs thought that their own voices were important and needed to be heard. Looked like a vanity sector overall

luc_ 4y ago
DonHopkins 4y ago
Just like the short-lived social olfactory trend started because some vcs thought their shit didn't stink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460
- barrysteve 4y ago
  Nobody would put the smell of shit over a picture of anything. Electronic olfactory stimulation would cement marketing associations for children aged 0-12. If somebody ever figured out the technical side of delivering smells affordable and instantly, he/she would have subtle influence over people years after they are exposed to the initial entertainment product that built an association and memory in the child.
  - TameAntelope 4y ago
    I take it you haven't heard of Prolitec[0]. Olfactory memory is exceptionally strong[1], and if a marketer could successfully tap into it, I imagine very positive outcomes. [0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-ambient-scenting-for-the-retail-market/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-ambien... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory
- nix0n 4y ago
  I thought you were posting April Fools articles until I saw the YYYY/MM part of the Wired URL.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Clubhouse was unfortunate to come about in the crypto boom. lots of inate crypto chat on there.

schlupfknoten 4y ago
Seems to affect Twitter as well. Every time I've checked out the Spaces tab in the app, the featured Spaces were 90% NFT / crypto promotion.
Uehreka 4y ago
Yeah, but that’s just one part of its local maximum. If crypto didn’t exist, I feel confident the hustle porn, personal finance and entrepreneurship stuff (more “How I Make $1000/mo In Passive Income”-style content and less Startup School) would rush to fill the gap.
- drannex 4y ago
  At the very least that would be marginally tenable to deal with and would have /some/ sort of variety to the conversation.
lmm 4y ago
On the contrary, I suspect it wouldn't have enjoyed what success it had without being able to lean on some very monetary FOMO.
fullshark 4y ago
The main people interested in talking to large groups of strangers are selling something, if not crypto boom it would be something else.
can16358p 4y ago
Or perhaps the crypto boom made it popular in a way which it would never be in the first place? Crypto at least gave it a chance.

rco8786 4y ago

The problem, IMO, is the “live” nature of things like Clubhouse/Spaces. Your audience has to be actively engaged at the right moment to get distribution, and even then you’re subject to the randomness that is live content. No ability to edit the boring parts out or add production value. Something that is like Twitter for Podcasts would be interesting I think. 1-5 minute audio clips designed to be consumed asynchronously, presented in a sort of timeline manner where you could feasibly just hit play and listen for 30m, getting quick hit audio content from 5-10 creators Imagine informative YouTube videos but without the “what’s up guys in this video we’re …blah blah” sort of fluff. Just straight to the point.

bilekas 4y ago
"A quick message from our sponsor before we get to the video - RAID shadow legends!"
- 0des 4y ago
  Do you cry sometimes? Borrow checker got you down? Try BetterHelp!
vyrotek 4y ago
If you mix the creators into a single timeline that sorts of turns it into a voice-only TikTok. I've been toying with an idea that's more of an async version of the Marco Polo app but for podcast-type content. Async bites of a single podcast episode which may involve one or more contributors continuously adding to the episode/discussion. Does anything like either of these exist already?

emptyfile 4y ago

Fascinating. I read the entire article without learning what social audio or Clubhouse are.

dan1234 4y ago
I would say it’s probably closest to a ‘live podcast’.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  So... unscheduled radio talk show? The obvious competitors are: - scheduled radio talk show. They may be inane but they're professional and consistent - recorded podcast: has the major advantages of being listenable on your own schedule and possibly well-edited - youtube: same as podcast, but with video as well - youtube live: the chat allows more people to participate simultaneously than folks trying to get airtime - discord: it's live and you might even know or get to know all the participants That's a lot of competition and not much in visible advantages

self_awareness 4y ago

Well I wanted to register and use it, but registration was closed. I've subscribed to be notified when the registration will be open again, but notification never came. Later I forgot about it completely.

throwk8s 4y ago
I never registered for Clubhouse, and forgot about it so completely I can't remember why I wasn't interested. There was a reason but I forgot what it was. In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I don't see how anyone can build a business on only this type of content, it's too synchronous.

petercooper 4y ago

I am a "very online" industry analyst type and I enjoyed listening to a lot of Clubhouse chats in late 2020. It wasn't all nonsense - there was value to be had, particularly around gathering current thoughts and, sometimes, inside baseball on various topics, technologies or companies, but you had to listen to a lot to get any gold. Podcasts are far more efficient if you're in a sector that has some good ones and if you really want to chat yourself, you'd probably do better to just create your own podcast or attend some networking events. That said, Twitter is a slightly different kettle of fish. Some of the live OSINT spaces around the invasion of Ukraine were hours ahead of mainstream media and did some amazing work earlier this year. Smaller community groups also seem able to use them productively to organize in a way that Clubhouse didn't seem to allow, perhaps because people already have social graphs on Twitter.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Part of it is the synchronous-asynchronous difference. Clubhouse requires you to be logged in and listening throughout the whole discourse, most other forms of "social media" (Twitter, Facebook, forums, ...) let you drop in and out. Clubhouse also fails to scale because only one person can be talking at a time. As the number of people in a room N increases, this becomes an increasing limitation... One of those that any software developer should have been able to tell you about ahead of time. That's a serious enough scaling problem on it's own but socially some people are real blowhards who never quit talking while other people are more like https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness and that is all complicated by social dynamics, gender, class, race, hierarchies, power relationships, etc. That OSINT group for instance with N people could have an output proportional to O(N) if there is no need for coordination between the people, but if everyone is paying full attention to the discussion it is only going to have O(1) productivity.
- Mixtape 4y ago
  With regard to the output productivity of the conversation, there's also something to be said about the "narrative control" that limiting speaking to a single person at a time brings. With voice platforms (including things like Discord, Zoom, etc.), there's always one thread of conversation going on. The meeting is generally a point A to point B discourse where circling back to examine a topic further is awkward and destroys the overall flow. People want to avoid that, so anyone who can manage to dominate the conversation and stop other people from interjecting has the power to effectively manage what comes next. There's a lot of potentially valuable conversations that get lost along the way as a result. As an aside, I've seen this bleeding into real-world conversations over the past few years as well. Pre- and post-COVID conversations with my peers in college were staunchly different in how they handled side conversations. Perhaps it's just a product of my cohort getting older and more accustomed to the norms of professional communication, but I've noticed far fewer productive side conversations in groups of roughly 7 or more and a much stronger focus on "staying on-topic". Text-based platforms have long since managed this issue with reply-based systems, threads, and hierarchical, nested conversations (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc.). This is really only possible asynchronously, though. In a voice format, the best you can do is leave to a breakout room or other channel and come back when you're done, but in doing so you're missing out on the conversation in the main thread. Unless we can somehow find a way to work past that limitation, I'm convinced that practically any platform that relies entirely on voice is going to fail to have the reach and community-building effect that something like Discord or Reddit has achieved. Additionally, all of this also fails to consider the fact that synchronous-only voice is yet another social distractor that demands your attention on someone's terms other than your own. As seems to be the sentiment on HN, I'm pretty staunchly opposed to normalizing yet another consumer of my time as necessary for social acceptance, but perhaps I'm a bad sample of the public opinion. Apologies if I repeated a bit of what you said here, but the point I'm trying to make is that you're entirely right about the obviousness of this issue. It doesn't take much consideration of the concept to realize that there's an immediate growth problem. Novel as the idea behind social audio might have been, it was doomed from the figurative (and literal) word one.

outsidetheparty 4y ago

One overvalued flash in the pan does not constitute a trend.

marban 4y ago

- Instant uninterestingness - No slot machine psychology and adhocracy - Low information density inflates usage time - Vanity barrier between speakers and listeners - No evergreen content / Indexability

herunan 4y ago

It’s not dead. It was popular because of it’s novelty, and now it’s just another form of communication or content consumption. Unfortunately for Clubhouse, that means that as soon as big social networks copy you, you need to innovate or die. Network effects of bigger social media are too powerful for Clubhouse, so it’s a bit of an unfair fight.

can16358p 4y ago
But is there any momentum in the big-network-copycats anyway? I believe it's not about Clubhouse in particular, but the whole idea, so even if Facebook copies it, it's still a dead-end (but would still do in order to dominate the space and keep users in).

can16358p 4y ago

I always thought the idea of Clubhouse was just a boring hype and deleted the app within 24h of starting to use it. Always thought it was just me. Apparently it really was a hype. At least in that form of it.

Thlom 4y ago
Everyone except some terminally online journalists and social media "experts" understood this was a hype and a stupid product doomed to fail.
- rchaud 4y ago
  VCs were pumping this hard. Journalists wouldn't have cared if Musk and other famous people weren't popping in during the initial hype phase.

mgamache 4y ago

Dead? No. But it's not the wildly popular service that people thought it would be. Clubhouse is mostly a dumpster fire. Someone might figure out the right way to do it, but right now it's a clunky mess of toxic rooms with the occasional substantive conversation.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

throw457 4y ago

Someone should tell them about discord.

thot_experiment 4y ago
and mumble, vent, xfire, teamspeak. Social audio isn't dead, it's one of the most consistently good aspects of technology because these idiots haven't figured out how to ruin it by trying to monetize the social aspects of it. I've spent my evening in a voice chat for the last 20 years, it's a solved problem.

jimkleiber 4y ago

For me, Clubhouse went from an exclusive party of real-name people I wanted to meet to an open party with lots of pseudonymous/anonymous accounts. Especially on a live social audio platform, which requires so much of my attention, I wanted to know who I was talking to and be excited to meet them, and that became harder and harder.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

>Is social audio already dead? The general rule of thumb, is that any headline that ends in a question mark is answered by "no," but I think that this one is "yes." Clubhouse, Marco Polo, etc. have not been very compelling; for different reasons. I think Clubhouse couldn't compete with video broadcast media, like TikTok, and Marco Polo also couldn't, but because it is one-to-one, without social "scoring." Also, the Clubhouse app wasn't very good, and was iOS-only. I think that it’s a good example of one that should probably have been done via a hybrid system. I think that, if we will release a native platform app, it needs to be absolutely top-Quality. No compromises. That's the case for the app I'm writing now.

tjoff 4y ago
For it to be dead, must it not have been alive first? From my perspective it clearly was not.
martin_a 4y ago
> and was iOS-only. I think that was a feature not a bug. Strengthened the FOMO.

sklargh 4y ago

What prevented Clubhouse from quickly devolving into an ersatz Discord. I feel like the audio chat capability + community management was already there.

xnyan 4y ago
For one, iOS only is a non-starter.

zthrowaway 4y ago

Wasn’t clubhouse taken over by political activists? I recall something like that contributing to its downfall.

ppeetteerr 4y ago

It took only a moment to realize that Social Audio is about as healthy as Instagram: it's groups of people promoting themselves. If you want to have a call with your friends, that already exists. If you want legitimate information, you have podcasts. There are conferences, panels, etc. Clubhouse got the hype right, but the "market fit" wrong.

rullopat 4y ago

Social audio has the same problem of an audio message: it comes always in the moment you cannot listen to it. Even worse, a message from a friend or relative has much bigger priority.

madmax108 4y ago

I feel like Clubhouse fell bang in the "This is a feature, not a product" [1] hole and have simply not been able to get out of it, esp once other apps came up with their own live-audio functionality (and given how Twitter and Clubhouse were very closely entwined, the launch of Twitter Spaces and Twitter pushing it quite aggressively was probably the nail in the coffin). Honestly though, I always felt like live audio was just a pandemic-era overhyped field[2] which still needs a few years in the sun before becoming ready for primetime, because the current implementations do not really bring anything fresh (or useful imo) to the table that other forms of communication don't bring with them (be it Youtube livestreams or podcasts or whatnot) [1] https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-in-venture-are-you-a-product-or-feature https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-in-v... [2] And it's not just limited to Clubhouse, but also region specific apps like Leher (https://leher.app/ https://leher.app/) which pivoted from social audio to some weird "do tasks to earn money" model

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
When your primary means of user acquisition is via somebody else's social network then this will always happen. Clubhouse built a neat little feature and then tried to leverage Twitter to get people to use it. But then Twitter just built it themselves and took all the lunch money. This has happened numerous times. Another high-profile example was Meerkat/Periscope. The best you can hope for is to be acquired/acqui-hired by said social network a la Periscope. But that's very rare.
CydeWeys 4y ago
It's definitely a feature, not a product. I've listened to a few of the live discussions on Twitter between experts in the Ukraine War (e.g. Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were in it), and definitely found that worthwhile. It was, essentially, a live podcast, that took some live questions. So unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I do think it has some value and isn't just for VCs' vanity, but it also just feels like a feature. I would never go out of my way to a site that only does this, but when I see a notification of a live stream when I'm already using Twitter, and the subject sounds interesting, I might join.
4y ago

mikewarot 4y ago

Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans talk at the same time. Podcasts are a form of social audio that scales well. Anything that lets someone talk 1:1 with their fans is going to have to have a rate throttling mechanism. For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-announced appearances, etc. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

dredmorbius 4y ago
Ding ding ding!!! This. There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard. The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem. The hard one is feedback at scale. There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising. It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost. In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations. Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense: - Lectio: the reading to be considered. - Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read. - Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr... These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.

Chris86 4y ago

I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Not necessarily deliberate, but that general flavour of startup that investors hoped to massive inflate and grab market share, with the expectation that there is some early mover advantage to be had in a new category. But because they were only manufacturing demand, rather than creating something people really wanted, it's just not worked out.

rvz 4y ago
> I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Attempted* quick pump and dump. They tried to get Twitter to acquire it for $4B and that failed so they are now scrambling to make money or make it worthy of an IPO. Since either outcome is unlikely, they are most likely to do a down-round with more layoffs as a consequence and probably close down in the next 5 years.

Havoc 4y ago

Was never alive. Only reason clubhouse thrived briefly was artificial constraints to create an aura of exclusivity

jsonne 4y ago

It's not dead it just got effectively integrated into existing networks like Twitter. I love spaces! I think there will be more innovation in the future with social audio but clubhouse felt like a flash in the pan to be sure.

CedarMills 4y ago

I was an early Clubhouse user. The initial conversations were very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other. It basically turned into an audio version of Twitter. After a couple of months, I ended up deleting the application. My wife uses Marco Polo a lot with her family. It's a great way for them to maintain an async conversation. I think for group no larger than five people, it makes a lot of sense. Is social audio dead? No. I do think that the market size is definitely a lot smaller.

joshstrange 4y ago
> The initial conversations were very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other. Eternal September all over again.

Finnucane 4y ago

Never actually tried it. From the descriptions I saw, it seemed like it would be like Twitter, but with actual yelling. Who would want that? Maybe the real product was better than that, but it didn't seem like a lot of incentive to try.

mcintyre1994 4y ago
I never used Clubhouse, but most Twitter Spaces aren't really like that. The reason is because unlike normal Twitter only a limited number of people are speakers, and you have to be selected by the host to speak. It's more like niche panel shows with a live audience, and sometimes Q+A with people being selected from the audience to ask a question.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  but what advantage does that have against podcasts when you can't participate unless you know the host? I could just listen to a conversation that's been recorded and get the same benefit, without having to schedule a live conversation I can't take part in. I don't see the draw over a podcast style show. Most live audience questions suck.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Claude_Shannon 4y ago

This was the first time I've ever heard of this term. I'm still not sure what it is exactly.

eganist 4y ago
Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces (possibly deprecated), Spotify Live are three of the biggest. Apparently Twitter had been in talks to acquire Clubhouse for $4bil. Hindsight is 20/20.

system16 4y ago

I got an invite when it started blowing up and gave it an honest try. Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves to each other, and the conversations were comically similar: - Start off by validating what a great community this is and how great and positive everyone is. - Story time: either a huge challenge they overcame to become the great success they are today, or trying to make the most basic common sense sound like some insightful breakthrough. - Repeat a few times, and then someone will "reset the room" and start over again. I couldn't help but laugh because I honestly couldn't believe it wasn't a parody.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
This tangentially reminds me of a shameless puff piece on one of the financial networks about a startup lead by a "self-made man" who invested part of his trust fund into his business and whose father, worth over $250M at the time, was a major investor.
alx__ 4y ago
The few rooms I found on Clubhouse that were interesting had a theme of reading bedtime/sleep stories. Which is essentially a live podcast to put you to sleep
- rchaud 4y ago
  I would expect to get trolled in rooms like that; it just sounds too contrived to not be a troll. Calm gentle voice interrupted by loud screams just as you were about to fall asleep, things like that.
chasing 4y ago
Agreed. Best case experiences were in rooms that felt like mid-tier tech conference panels. Clubhouse could've leaned into the above idea and really figured it out. Like, how do you mix the experience of a live in-person panel of experts and also leverage asynchrony across space and time... Maybe there would've been something there. But as it stood, it felt like it hit the jackpot with a clever idea and a bunch of hype but never actually solved any of the hard problems that might turn it into something real.

pjmlp 4y ago

For me it never started, as I never got the point of them. They seemed to evolve into another kind of TED talks, but even without trying to do anything quality wise in proper content.

rg111 4y ago

Social audio is not dead. It existed for decades, and it was known as... conference call. Before internet, we used conference calls in our friends circle and among relatives, a lot. Now we do a group call in Meet or Telegram. And Discord has a lot of very active social voice in many channels. Data is so cheap in so many places, people often just opt for video. But what many people still prefer is just audio calls. Social audio is not dead. What is dead is Clubhouse who were stupid enough to believe that hype alone could cause growth and made normies beg or pay for invites. And who only released an app for a platform that is practically non-existent outside oof the US and the EU.

tjpnz 4y ago

At a previous company I attended regular team lunches with a particularly obnoxious colleague. It wasn't that he was a bad guy, just a snob who liked the sound of his own voice and talking over people with his pseudo intellectual rantings and ravings. Clubhouse replicates that experience almost too well. The only thing missing is the food and the obligation to be present.

Alacart 4y ago

Despite many knocking it here, I think there's at least one significant aspect of the clubhouse/twitter spaces/etc. model of audio chat: the much stronger feeling of connection that people get from being able to literally speak to the big personalities in whatever their area of interest is. we can debate whether that's good or bad, scalable, a feature or a product. But I think it's undeniable that the emotional dopamine hit people get from that are a lot higher than getting any kind of async response, especially text. It makes it feel much more real. Even if you don't interact at all and just listen, it feels like you're an insider, you've made it into the club, and you could speak up. Like you practically know <insert names>, you were on a call with them earlier today! That kind of interaction I think we might see a lot more of as a feature for e.g. streaming platforms. People crave it.

na85 4y ago
That's exactly what their value prop was. Normies get a chance to feel like they're friends with famous people. It's social status signalling as a service.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Was it ever particularly alive in the mainstream? Can't say I ever encountered anybody other than marketers/talking heads/influencers who were into it.

randomdata 4y ago
This is the first I have ever heard of it, so I'm guessing not.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

AlexandrB 4y ago

Does this site go into an endless reload loop for anyone else? I wonder if it's my content blockers or something else...

dayvid 4y ago

I think only 1-2 clubhouses I listened to were any good. It was gamed by opportunists and grifters lightning fast. Lots of noise with very little signal. I would enjoy it and Twitter spaces more if they supported replay w/ 2x speed, skipping over or only playing certain speakers, or some sort of auto-tagging on topics so you can skip to what's interesting.

mikhmha 4y ago

Social audio isn’t dead - I see it becoming a more prominent feature on existing social networks. Never used or heard about Clubhouse when it came out but recently I’ve been using Twitter spaces and I’ve found it to be very valuable. In financial twitter I’ve joined spaces with some great discussion that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. Big part of it is the drop-in drop-out nature of it. So you’ll have analysts from different sectors joining a space to offer their 2cents and ask really great questions. Really all you need to do is @ a blue checkmark and there is a high chance they will join to weigh in. I can see LinkedIn adding a feature like this in the future - though I think LinkedIn spaces would be terrible (insane amount of self-promotion ugh). Reddit is already testing it.

joshstrange 4y ago

I got an invite but never signed up, it always felt like "podcasts but worse". I mean sure, there was the opportunity to interact in the audience but I really dislike "forced-realtime" anything. Also the chances that people I look up and respect were on ClubHouse (or similar), at a time I was free, talking about something I had input on, and (most importantly) wanted input from the audience were about 0.

gregmac 4y ago
> it always felt like "podcasts but worse". Even without the live/realtime aspect, I think it can be summed up by: > I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. > - Blaise Pascal I don't want to listen to a rambling, un-edited conversation that might be good and/or interesting, I want to listen to a well thought-out talk that is good and interesting, and is only exactly as long as it needs to be. Edited and/or curated podcasts (or videos) are simply a better avenue for that.

Fede_V 4y ago

Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse a grand total of 3x before never turning it on. I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics, history, etc.. Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes, so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way tethered to their concrete achievements.

rchaud 4y ago
But that begs the question: why would anyone of note use Clubhouse, if not as an continuation of the mostly "one-way megaphone" strategy that made them big on Twitter or elsewhere?

testmasterflex 4y ago

Was always dead since there was no way prior to a conversation possible to assess the quality of it. Unless you are playing/horsing around, who’s willing to play the lottery with their time like that?

wolframhempel 4y ago

I'm currently working on a social Audio take tied into podcasting (which is very much alive). The idea is to have live podcasting a la Twitch or YouTube live, including chat and tipping. You can also invite other people to record the show with and even bring in members from the audience. At the end, it let's you download everything as Mp3 for post editing and publishing as a podcast. The live discussion will remain open as part of https://podbabble.com https://podbabble.com. The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed.

macspoofing 4y ago
>The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed. And how is that theory proving up?
- wolframhempel 4y ago
  Dunno, not released yet :-)

kristiandupont 4y ago

This reminded me of this absolutely hilarious Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913 https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913 >Emily wants to know about the future. Are the rumors true? Will you add VIDEO to clubhouse?? >You pause dramatically. >... "Video is a bug, not a feature" >Boom. F*cking Nailed It

gregmac 4y ago
This thread is really good, some key points I took: > But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW. > Your engineers [..] warn you: multiplying "content is interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder. > You rebuttle: "Well - Twitch figured out how to do this! Twitch is live content - so clearly it's possible!" > 1 - twitch creators are live ~40 hours a week. Our best creators do weekly shows. ~3-4 hrs a week max. The game makes content creation easier > 2 -Twitch is vertically focused (gaming). Clubhouse is horizontal. You need "great content" across EVERY category. ... > Creators with big audience (proven good content) don't want to switch platforms. Spend an hour "live" on clubhouse reaching 2,000 people... or do a podcast and reach 200,000?
macspoofing 4y ago
That thread is awesome. Prescient too.
reaperducer 4y ago
Reading this Twitter thread made me wonder if the future of Clubhouse is in the business sector. My company has monthly "all hands" meetings where the C-levels dog and pony about what's coming up. Using Zoom for this was OK when everyone was working across two time zones. But in the COVID era we're spread out across many more. If Clubhouse could come up with a super-easy and super-attractive way for businesses to time-shift this content, it could find paying subscribers. Something along the lines of "Listen (Watch?) the leaders at 10:00amET, or the replays at 10:00amPT, or 9:00amGMT." Recorded, but with the appointment urgency of live. I know that many tools like Zoom or Teams have the ability to record the video for people to consume later, but from what I've heard from the people in the HR department, it's either complicated, or time-consuming, or both. And for people who are more audio-focused, many times that's a better way to go.

me_me_mu_mu 4y ago

Most rooms were just self absorbed narcissistic people talking to each other. “Social” anything is a wasteland. Just build useful tools that help people do things, like buy plane tickets.

macspoofing 4y ago

Maybe it's dead in the way Vine (Twitter) was, until TikTok came in and took over the social media space. There is a use-case for social audio but it may need some refinement.

LegitShady 4y ago

clubhouse doesn't scale because the more people are talking, the less you can tell which conversation is important or matters. The success of clubhouse is its own destruction.

wolverine876 4y ago

Is there a description of the cycle that failed products or innovations go through? For successful ones, there's, First, they laugh at you, Then, they tell you it's not in the orthodoxy, Then they tell you they knew it all along. As trite and simplistic as that is, I find it to be a reliable prediction; I think what it really reflects is an instinct to resist change, to unconsciously follow the status quo. By the last stage, the innovation becomes the status quo and it's sincere in one way: the people who 'knew it all along' truly followed the status quo all along. What is the cycle for failed innovations? An end stage is schadenfreude. In fact, the end stage is exactly the same: They 'knew' all along that it would fail, it just has some schadenfreude added. All the stages may be the same. If someone predicts every challenging innovation will fail, they'll usually be right! And regardless, they are sticking with the status quo throughout.

boringg 4y ago

I feel like clubhouse is A16z's greatest expected to be success flop. They invested heavily into this app both time, clout and money. Not that I think VCs are able to see the future but they do uptalk the vantage point they have being able to see the bleeding edge in live time. This one shows that even with the advantage that they didn't see it with the right perspective. FWIW I really enjoyed in the early days when there were certain people on platform. After a bit it became dilutive in content quality and it sadly seemed more like hucksters on platform. If Clubhouse has done a post mortem on how they didn't convert their insane growth - I wager it was that they didn't screen quality.

ls612 4y ago
Clubhouse grew during the pandemic when some people needed to signal to others that they weren't meeting in person. Once that need fell away it started dying.

zbuf 4y ago

Most of Clubhouse was a vacuum of hot garbage, but this medium _can_ be great. It was interesting to experience a really great example of social audio -- as a guest on a "show" for blind and low vision podcasters. The perfect use of the perfect medium, I think. The differentiator was the work and preparation done by the host. But that doesn't make this a completely new medium -- all of the traditional elements of a live radio programme were there; a great host (who keeps things moving), organised guests in advance, and a community with Q&As from the audience members. What was new was the tooling, and the ability for such an extensive show to be made in software and operated by one person (and a blind one at that). https://the-blind-podmaker.pinecast.co/episode/df71fa32/blind-podcasters-roundtable-for-7-june-2021 https://the-blind-podmaker.pinecast.co/episode/df71fa32/blin...

blululu 4y ago

I am a bit disappointed that discussions of audio based social media is basically limited to Clubhouse. Personally I really enjoyed using Dialup. I joined in ~2019 and it was a great place to have real conversations with total strangers. During the quarantines it was one of the best windows I had into the broader world. Having an intimate conversation with a total stranger is a totally novel form of human interaction and I personally had a lot of good experiences with the service, even though it received none of the massive VC backed hype and media accolades. Personally I think that the problem with clubhouse and its competitor clones is more about how they structured conversations and less about social audio as a medium.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

goopthink 4y ago

Using Clubhouse as the end-all for social audio does the "space" a disservice, IMO. I used Clubhouse early on and it fell squarely into every single trope and commentary that everyone here is posting about it. Much later, I was introduced to "Cappuccino" [1], a social audio app that couldn't be more different from Clubhouse. It's slow-social (you only get updates once day (the cappuccino composed of 'beans' that everyone submits). Each audio update is capped at 3 minutes (though you can submit as many as you'd like), and you can attach a photo if you'd like. The app auto-adds some generic intro/outtro music and production cleanup and combines it into a single podcast-like update. I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of friends. The audio-first approach makes it easy to just talk about something (an idea, a life update) for a few moments (low cost to participate). The production value and once-a-day update makes it feel like a nice 'ritual' to receive everyone's updates. The intentionally asyncronousness emphasizes listening and thoughtfulness against trying to hop on to a comment thread. It honestly feels like sending postcards/letters out to folks... but audio. Can you do this as an audio group text? Kind of, yes. But that's like saying "you can recreate instagram by sending photos over whatsapp." Yes, but that misses the point. I'm not affiliated in any way with them but I think they're a very neat counterpoint to Clubhouse in terms of "social audio" (and slow vs fast social). [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cappuccino-stay-in-touch/id1506849927 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cappuccino-stay-in-touch/id150...

soneca 4y ago
> ” I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of friends” Would people listen to these small updates? Audio is pretty big in WhatsApp. But it’s widely accepted that audio messages are good for people who send it and bad for who receive (it is a hassle to listen to it, even at 2x, comparing to reading a text message). Also, your use case seems very well covered by WhatsApp and Telegram. I am part of a Telegram from a famous writer where he only sends audio messages (one-to-many, closed threads, only accepts emojis). It is hard to differentiate a product enough as an audio only social network to beat Telegram and WhatsApp on most use cases.
- Flimm 4y ago

krnlpnc 4y ago

I hope so. It's a very wasteful and low resolution way to share information. We've had telephones and group calls since before we had computers, and there is a reason why we shifted to text. Plus the platform is inherently not accessibility friendly. It just makes no sense overall, but I can see why it was quick burning fad.

throwaway290 4y ago
On the contrary, voice is too high resolution. Live and interactive, with no video to distract, makes it immediately obvious when someone is bullshitting you, compared to text (especially 140char limited) or pre-recorded videos/podcasts. The only thing clubhouse would be worth for is improv comedy, but there are not enough good troupes.
- krnlpnc 4y ago
  On the other hand voice is half duplex, transfers data slowly and doesn’t retransmit lost fragments. Agree to disagree I guess.

SoftTalker 4y ago

I didn't even know it was sick.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Good riddance. I hope a16z lost a lot of money.

acjohnson55 4y ago

They tried the classic strategy of making it invite-only (and iPhone-only) at first, and while this did work initially, I think it also established a culture of elitism that made me never want to install the app. That and I'm busy. I don't have time for appointment listening.

diebeforei485 4y ago

Twitter Spaces is actually a reasonably good product. I heard that Twitter offered to acquire Clubhouse but Clubhouse turned them down - that was a bad decision.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

No, it's alive and well, you just aren't invited. You can't engineer or buy access into communities that you are not cool enough to be a part of. If you do somehow manage it, the core people who made the community cool before you showed up will quickly move elsewhere SV nerds gotta stop trying to invite themselves to cool people parties, it's cringe. Accept your limitations as well as your strengths. Accept that real membership in those communities has a price that you are not actually willing and/or able to pay

jononomo 4y ago

I like Callin — I listen to Wes Yang and Jesse Singal on there. It seems like every show has a technical glitch or a user who doesn’t understand muting/unmuting, but overall I like it.

baryphonic 4y ago

A lot of the comments here are saying that Clubhouse is a lot of noise and very little signal. I largely agree that's what did it in, but I think I joined right before it hit that growth inflection point, and I was able to find something of a community until everyone kind of gave up. One night I had a discussion with a guy who had protested at Tiananmen Square in 1989, then went back to his university the day before the tanks rolled in. Later, he emigrated to the US. I met and befriended another guy who lived in Austin and was giving updates about the then-current Texas freeze. He was loosely connected to some of the folks behind NumPy/Anaconda, and so I got to spend several nights hanging out with them, which was pretty interesting. The biggest problem was always search/reputation (judging from my re-opening of the app for the first time in months, this is still the biggest problem). It was always gamed by "influencer" types, whose number one skill was glomming onto the New Hotness/Current Thing. Usually when opening the app, I'd need to scroll through one or two screen lengths of junk (e.g. "chat w/ [retired pro athlete] NFTs!!!", "be your own record label!!!") to find a topic that seemed remotely interesting. Filtering was (is?) hot garbage until I was following around 50 active users. The product people never realized that the truly influential people who were interesting were not on Clubhouse 16 hours a day, but would be on for an hour or two; the rest of the time, they were honing their craft at something outside of influencer culture. The other major problem was notification fatigue. I went through a phase of intense work on a side project, and didn't have time for Clubhouse very often. The app had some bug where it wouldn't respect my relatively spartan notification preferences, and was pinging me all the time, so I just disabled them altogether. A couple months later, I realized I had not been in there for a while, and when I logged in, few of the people I had connected with were still active (this was around a year ago). Ultimately, I think Clubhouse was an idea that in its current implementation could only exist during the pandemic. That being said, at times it felt like YouTube did back in '06 or Twitter in 2010: you could connect with anyone and learn about nearly any topic with a bit of dedication. Unlike a lot of the social networking experiences these days, it truly felt like there was a chance to meet someone who in the regular course of life you'd never get to meet.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

filereaper 4y ago

I've been enjoying Callin: https://www.callin.com/ https://www.callin.com/ Its not as crowded as Clubhouse and all the low signal to noise hustlers aren't there (yet). There's a few podcasts that are getting traction. Pull Request: Had the Paypal Mafia over and Emil Micheal talked about Super Pumped tv series. The hosts may have differing opinions and political views though, so might not be for everybody.

sethkim 4y ago

I actually built something in this space in the last two years called roundtable.audio (https://roundtable.audio/ https://roundtable.audio/). I actually also created an HN extension found here: https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/ https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/. See this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26856883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26856883. I've thought about it quite bit, and I think one of the long-term strategies to revive the space is having live-audio conversations attached to specific news articles, tweets, and other places on the web which prompt discussion. I also considered creating a chrome extension at one point which allows someone visiting an arbitrary webpage to be able to audio chat with those who are also on the same page. I'm planning on shutting down the deployment for roundtable.audio in the coming months, so if anyone wants to take these projects and run with them, I'd be happy to chat about how to collaborate or hand things over. The repo is open-source as well, but I'd certainly like to hear what you plan on doing with it or how I can help!

bborud 4y ago

I’m surprised Clubhouse is still around. I gave it a try as a way to have informal discussion with friends, former colleagues etc. I also tried to listen to a few events, but as other people have pointed out, one could be forgiven for thinking it was satire. What made me uninstall the app and forget about the service was the sleazy grabbing at my contact list and that Clubhouse came across as completely insincere. The image Clubhouse quickly acquired here in Norway was as a service for gullible suckers.

pixel_tracing 4y ago

I tried clubhouse and I remember when I lost interest. I had joined a room full of people discussing cryptocurrencies (more than 500 people). I mistakingly thought it was an open forum to discuss the technology. After being picked to ask a question, I asked the “thought leaders” of the group whether or not the technology itself made sense, or you could just utilize a singular (centralized) database to solve some of the problems some currencies are proposing to solve. Also the fact that computational power is wasted on hashing. I was instantly called a “shill”, creating “FUD.” In fact I didn’t even get to finish to finish my question and I was muted and called a “motherfucker.” Yea. I have no respect for that app anymore.

ramoz 4y ago

Clubhouse was really fun and interesting around Feb 2021. Then they started rolling out the “Creator” crap, and tbh their overemphasis and product development around cultures was a turn off.