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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 influe

• 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.
• aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Sounds like a low-rent TED Talk.
• michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  This sounds like an audio version of LinkedIn.
  • georgeecollins 4y ago
    LinkedIn kind of creeps me out because it is the only social network I actively participate in as my authentic self. (Because I make games, I have to go on all kinds of things in test accounts) When people I know make an announcement and I see it I feel like I don't want to be supportive. And it is useful to know where people are working that you haven't seen for a while. But to post an article? I don't know.
    • ruskibeats 4y ago
      This, so much this!!!
• rchaud 4y ago
  > Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves Talk is cheap. That's why this model doesn't work.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    Text is cheaper, yet Twitter.
    • rchaud 4y ago
      Text is cheap to scale on Twitter, which is why it succeeded. Your message can be read and understood in a matter of seconds. That's much faster than listening to and processing an audio clip. Text tweets have infinite reach with enough retweets. It can be embedded on websites, drawing a new audience that doesn't spend time on Twitter. It doesn't disappear if you weren't there right when the tweet was being posted. Audio has none of these things. Nobody wants to watch a recorded stream, the whole appeal is that you are LIVE with everyone at the same time.
• kurthr 4y ago
  It blew up mid-pandemic when tech/VC people were mostly trapped at home with little social to do, but drink delivered cocktails on Zoom. It also coincided a huge increase in bit/altcoin prices, which made pump/dump schemes profitable (especially early NFT). Politics also bloomed in Sept-Dec 2020 when BLM wanted somewhere to motivate as did those across the spectrum of "suppressed voices" after Jan 6. Yeah, pretty boring. https://www.boldspace.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-clubhouse/ https://www.boldspace.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of...
• _fat_santa 4y ago
  This is the impression I got as well, and I didn't even have to use the app. I got the sense that all anyone cared about was growing their Clubhouse community, rather than using it because they liked it. It's hard to quantify or put your finger on it, but there was all this "hustle culture" around Clubhouse. Everyone talked about how great it was and how it was going to transform social media. But it was clear in that few believed it and just wanted to be the first to pitch their tent on new plot social media. As a result Clubhouse had a certain "emptyness" to it. Everyone was talking about how great it was and how great it was going to be, but there wasn't any actual content, just people repeating that message over and over again, or adjacent "hustle culture" topics like Stocks, Crypto, GaryVee Worship, etc. Since people in this space are very vocal online, you got the impression right off the bat that Clubhouse was skyrocketing in popularity, but it ended up being that you just had a small group of people in an echo chamber.
  • nstart 4y ago
    In some ways I think this “meta” conversation style is part of the early stage of nearly every social network. Especially the ones that are public messaging by default (as opposed to something like FB or IG which was in theory at least, friends and family first). Twitter was a lot of talking about Twitter. Mastodon was and sometimes still is the same. Reddit had lots of meta chats. Even the early stages of fb had discussion of how it compared to hi5 or whatever network we migrated from. Same with google plus. I think one mark of success of the network is the moment it escapes that conversation. In my opinion it means that the usage of the network is no longer a novelty and is now part of a routine.
• vlunkr 4y ago
  Someone should make a platform like this that somehow de-incentivizes influencer culture. I want to see regular people having conversations, not trying to build a following. It's a poison that has snuck into essentially every social media platform.
  • rglullis 4y ago
    Join the Fediverse. Most people there have no interest in mainstream culture and none of the software is built in a way to gamify engagement. I keep thinking of putting together a bridge between twitter and my mastodon server, but I am always postponing it because it feels wrong.
    • giraffe_lady 4y ago
      But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself. If it became as popular as other platforms it would attract people with similar goals as are on other platforms. The technology isn't intentionally designed to reward them, but they will still find rewards and pursue them if it is their best option.
      • rglullis 4y ago
        Not necessarily. Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed intentionally lack features that would be geared for influencers. Mastodon has no "quote tweet" to avoid having people taking conversations out of context. Pixelfed even has admin-controlled options to disable "likes" and display of counts altogether. The clients, having no "algorithm" beyond basic chronological sort, make it hard for influencers to game the system. And it wouldn't be too difficult to have an instance where users have limited follower counts to keep the conversation more personal.
        • ChadNauseam 4y ago
          Chronological order makes it incredibly easy for "influencers" to game the system. Just post a lot. The system that's hardest to game is the one with the most reliance on algorithms, TikTok. On TikTok, you don't go viral because of some mechanical effect where >1/n people retweet you to their n-sized audience or anything like that, you go viral because the algorithm showed your video to random people and enough of them liked it that the algorithm realized your video is the one that some particular subgroup is most likely to enjoy. (Sorry for the run-on sentence.) On TikTok you don't have to post every day to "grow an audience", you have to post literally one good video, and if it's really good, it'll get 200k likes by the next morning even if it's the first thing you've ever posted. I think that also leads to a reduction in "hustle culture" – if you post something on YouTube most likely no one will ever see it no matter how great it is. But if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.
• felipellrocha 4y ago
  Same. I left thinking that the concept was cool, but the problem they had was discoverability. Bad actors were taking advantage of the system and pushing down good content. It was cool for the first 3 weeks when the content was amazing, and I felt like I was able to passively listen to fantastic content while working. Afterwards, it just became too much of a hassle to swift through everything in order to find the content I found interesting, so I left.
• tomc1985 4y ago
  Clubhouse etc has made me even more suspicious of anyone who uses the term "thought leader" in any serious capacity
  • celim307 4y ago
    It’s a good filter for me to single out narcissists. Everyone wants to be a cult leader
• mbostleman 4y ago
  Same experience here. I've had the lingering suspicion that live audio is too real and that it makes the lack of authenticity and narcissism of social media influencing too obvious. Maybe someone should try 15 second sound bites that are scripted, rehearsed, edited, and mixed with music.
• narrator 4y ago
  I tried to have fun with Twitter's Periscope a year ago, which has been out for a while. It's a group video chat app where anyone can pop in. In that way it's sort of like clubhouse, but with video. When I would get on, it was 80% people sitting around talking to their friends, often in thick accents about nothing of particular interest (e.g people I don't know, things the chat participants experienced together that I have insufficient context to understand). That's probably 95% of the internet voice and video chats and I'm just not aware of it because I'm not randomly dropping in on people's conversations like you're allowed to do on periscope. Anyway, it's not the most easily monetizable thing, I'd imagine. On Telegram voice chat, there's always some jerk or lunatic who talks over everyone who the rest of the chat participants have to tell to shut up. I think this is just a telegram problem because clubhouse has better moderation features. Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk why not use Zoom? It's a better experience in every way. What's the benefit of letting random people drop in? Maybe with very clever moderation features it could work, but as is it seems kind of pointless.
  • autoexec 4y ago
    > Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk why not use Zoom? Because they're a terrible company who has repeatedly demonstrated that they're at best shockingly incompetent at protecting your data or at worst maliciously allowing it to be leaked and collected by 3rd parties. Still, there are a lot of non-zoom options for video chat that would be a better experience so your overall point still stands, but it's still just weird to see anyone ask "why not use Zoom?" when by this time you'd expect to hear "Why would anyone still use Zoom?"
• seattle_spring 4y ago
  So... LinkedIn in audio format? Sounds like a waking nightmare.
• derevaunseraun 4y ago
  > 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. Just sounds like LinkedIn. But I always see this kind of garbage on places that aren't pseudonymous, if there's any degree of anonymity they (rightly) get shit flung at them. That's what's nice about HN imo. Fewer bullshitters stinking up the room
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  My favorite thing about Clubhouse were the profile descriptions people chose to write about themselves. Somehow they were even worse than Twitter profile descriptions, and were both deeply unironic and hilariously serious. Ever meet someone with a doctorate degree who insists on being addressed as "Doctor" So-and-so at all times? I've only met a handful of people like that, thankfully, but it was like Clubhouse was a shining light in the night to these self-obsessed moths.
• shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  I sincerely tried using clubhouse, but all I could find were rooms that I can only describe as South indian sex rings? I was not expecting that
• rideontime 4y ago
  sounds like every crypto Twitter Space I've lurked in.