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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,

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.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    My son hates on Discord pretty seriously and so do I. I had fun joining Discords to coordinate play in League of Legends, but there are few things I dread more than the open source project than the open source project that says "join our Discord". There are numerous problems such as: discords are often divided into way too many sub-rooms, somebody with too much time on their hands is always the first person to introduce the forum to people joining, etc.
    - Mixtape 4y ago
      Yeah, in retrospect Discord may not have been the best example for the point I was trying to make. As much as I like what it does right, I also have a lot of criticisms of it. The "too may channels" issue is absolutely real, and it makes a lot of servers overwhelming. It's also not indexable at all, meaning I often have to resort to using the search bar if something isn't pinned. Admittedly the latter of these isn't the worst experience (Discord search outpaces Slack search by a mile in my experience) but the fact of the matter is that finding a specific moment in a conversation in Discord is far more difficult than it is on something like a mid-2000s forum unless threads are required and their usage is enforced. More important though is the point you made about "somebody with too much time on their hands." Discord definitely pushes the boundaries of asynchrony at times. On bigger servers, it definitely feels like catching up on past messages is less favorable than being online and active as often as possible. This isn't necessarily anything new (while I've never used it, I've heard that IRC occasionally faces a similar issue) but something about it being baked into the nature of the service can feel very invasive at times. I've yet to find a community on Discord that I felt really bonded with outside of people I know IRL or through friends because contribution is far too often king. Perhaps there are more similarities than I realized between Discord and social audio in the general-use case. Single-stream communication divided up into rooms, favoring of the most active individuals, and an emphasis on synchronicity seem to be common traits between the two. I'm not sure what this could mean for Discord in the future, though.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  It always sounded like audio blogs to me.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Isn't that a podcast? There is also a genre of Youtube video that competes with podcasts. Channels like https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey and https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland have good visuals but have stand-alone audio tracks and make great background noise when you are doing something else.
    - thaway2839 4y ago
      This is the ultimate problem with Clubhouse/Twitter spaces. Podcasts exist. And they're already great for 1 way audio communication. So Clubhouse had to push for N-way audio communication as a differentiator, and it's really hard for that to be useful. It's really rare for the audience's contribution to be useful. And it's even rarer for the audience contribution to be useful in a way that cannot be done equally as well, if not better, in an associated chat room with a live podcast.

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.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  My son hates on Discord pretty seriously and so do I. I had fun joining Discords to coordinate play in League of Legends, but there are few things I dread more than the open source project than the open source project that says "join our Discord". There are numerous problems such as: discords are often divided into way too many sub-rooms, somebody with too much time on their hands is always the first person to introduce the forum to people joining, etc.
  - Mixtape 4y ago
    Yeah, in retrospect Discord may not have been the best example for the point I was trying to make. As much as I like what it does right, I also have a lot of criticisms of it. The "too may channels" issue is absolutely real, and it makes a lot of servers overwhelming. It's also not indexable at all, meaning I often have to resort to using the search bar if something isn't pinned. Admittedly the latter of these isn't the worst experience (Discord search outpaces Slack search by a mile in my experience) but the fact of the matter is that finding a specific moment in a conversation in Discord is far more difficult than it is on something like a mid-2000s forum unless threads are required and their usage is enforced. More important though is the point you made about "somebody with too much time on their hands." Discord definitely pushes the boundaries of asynchrony at times. On bigger servers, it definitely feels like catching up on past messages is less favorable than being online and active as often as possible. This isn't necessarily anything new (while I've never used it, I've heard that IRC occasionally faces a similar issue) but something about it being baked into the nature of the service can feel very invasive at times. I've yet to find a community on Discord that I felt really bonded with outside of people I know IRL or through friends because contribution is far too often king. Perhaps there are more similarities than I realized between Discord and social audio in the general-use case. Single-stream communication divided up into rooms, favoring of the most active individuals, and an emphasis on synchronicity seem to be common traits between the two. I'm not sure what this could mean for Discord in the future, though.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
It always sounded like audio blogs to me.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Isn't that a podcast? There is also a genre of Youtube video that competes with podcasts. Channels like https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey and https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland have good visuals but have stand-alone audio tracks and make great background noise when you are doing something else.
  - thaway2839 4y ago
    This is the ultimate problem with Clubhouse/Twitter spaces. Podcasts exist. And they're already great for 1 way audio communication. So Clubhouse had to push for N-way audio communication as a differentiator, and it's really hard for that to be useful. It's really rare for the audience's contribution to be useful. And it's even rarer for the audience contribution to be useful in a way that cannot be done equally as well, if not better, in an associated chat room with a live podcast.