> Make no mistake, most of these conversations will be terrible. That, though, is the case for all user-generated content.
My perception is that Clubhouse is that it's yet-another amplifier for the group of folks who already have a large following and are able to produce quality content. Listening to anything long-form and live risks being a huge waste of time. Audiences are willing to listen to well-known people because it has a higher chance of being interesting at all.
Unfortunately, the feedback I've heard is that the meetings hosted by the rest of the not-so well-known community have been generally terrible. I think people underestimate power of async communication and how it powers discoverability. There's too much noise out there already and very little time to filter it out to discover new content. Especially when the content is only produced live. Growing a YouTube/Podcast audience and growing a Clubhouse audience are going to be very different challenges.
I'm also unconvinced that this is a winner-take-all space. My understanding is that the technology moat here is very narrow compared to what it takes to run YouTube, Twitch, etc. I've already seen several interesting hacks put together by individuals with their own twist to this space.
That said, I'd really like to see the community stop claiming that "Clubhouse will be bigger than X platform!" such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
I think another important point being missed is how hard it is to create compelling improvised content. Youtube and Tiktok are amateur productions but the successful creators are still writing and editing. Conversations are going to meander and the absolute worst offense possible for this kind of medium is being boring.
Looking at well-funded but ultimately unsuccessful competition in other spaces - Microsoft's Mixer (Twitch) and Google Plus (Facebook) to name two, though there are many others - it's not about the technology moat for consumer-oriented Internet companies, it's about what the technology enables. I've had the ability to have a multi-person phone call (party line of yore) since before the Internet, but oversimplifying what Clubhouse does as a modern implementation of that specific technology belies a belief in Internet company success that it's about having impossible-to-replicate underlying technology and being the only company to offer a thing.
The most validating thing as an entrepreneur is for there to be competition, because it means someone else recognized that you're right - there's a market and a product that can fit that market, and that money can be made off of it.
Wow, that's discouraging. I thought the barrier to entry would mean better content across the board. But, I suppose that's the difference between a falsely erected barrier to make it seem more special and exclusive, and technical barriers to entry which filter out poor quality content naturally. If "anyone" can create content, most of it will be garbage, and the big names will get further amplified.
I agree with you, and at the same time, there will still be some people who are newcomers but adopted clubhouse at the right time and will become stars because of it. Maybe they weren't even newcomers, just good at what they do.
So while looking at it from a large numbers angle, yes, the power law applies and winners take all, digging into individual level stories, there will be people who will rise up thanks to the new app.
Not sure what that means, but I do still think there are opportunities here.
I don’t think they have their filtering right at the moment, and they’ll have to find a sweet spot before everyone turns off notifications for good. I’m following Kimdotcom who is an interesting person, but whenever he joins in on something, I’m notified. I like to hear what he has to say, but not every bloody time, especially not at 3am when it’s a German-only speaking club!
First time I went on Clubhouse, first got in a room with some Silicon Valley types talking about how to grow your startup. I get enough of that content so left to explore further and found a room with some African Americans discussing the best way to "snort crack from a booty hole". Perhaps it's my sense of humour but I laughed my head off and was immediately hooked. Felt like the Internet of the "good old days". Also I'm comfortable talking on voice from doing a podcast. Actually I usually hook up my Rødecaster Pro for better quality audio.
Some random tips I've found make Clubhouse more entertaining...
- Follow lots of people - don't be like Twitter, Instagram etc. trying to have more followers than follows. The more people you follow, the more diverse your room suggestions become
- From the home screen of the app, scroll down and find the little "Explore" button ... this will take you to more rooms. Smaller rooms tend to be lower down
- If you want to get involved in a discussion, go to the smaller rooms
- Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph. This is an interesting take on social graphs I think (which I'm guessing they will disable)
- Most of all, get out of your comfort zone, when it comes to your normal interests / ethnicity etc. It's very low friction to talk to anyone and people are largely polite. It's a great to get to know groups of people you'd otherwise avoid and get new perspectives.
If you want to connect hit me up on @harryfcks in the app.
> Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph.
Wow, this was fascinating. There was a weird dichotomy on mine. If I clicked on my straight, white, male friends, in almost every case the chain ended in just one or two clicks with an OG user.
If I clicked on anyone else (minority, women, etc), it was a long chain of people that usually involved a long string of black men and women.
My own chain was an exception, having been invited by a minority woman and going through that long chain of black men and women. Even though I'm friends with a bunch of those straight white guys with short chains. But I never asked for an invite when they were all advertising invites on Facebook. I only joined when my friend insisted and sent me an invite.
I don't know what any of that actually means, I just found it really interesting.
I found that if I went higher a few levels from me, the sideways, then everyone was either an internet marketer, some form of influencer, or startup “guru”.
Maybe it’s just my local graph, but it turned me off somewhat
I don't use the notifications - have them disabled. I just dip in when I have time and see what's happening. May not be the best strategy but works for me.
Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph. This is an interesting take on social graphs I think.
The first time I saw this kind of thing was on lobste.rs, where they call it the “user tree”: https://lobste.rs/u
On both Clubhouse and lobste.rs, surfacing the invite tree makes users more mindful of who they invite. To an extent, they’re vouching for that person, and can be held responsible if that person misbehaves.
Does anyone know what social network first exposed invite trees? I assume it can’t have originated recently with lobste.rs.
Plenty of p2p communities have been doing something similar for years. If you invite someone to the forum, and they get banned, you get banned too... or at least have your privileges revoked for some time.
I'll give my thoughts. Although the wording seems clunky at first, the GP is actually identifying something really important about the growth of Clubhouse as a platform. Similar to Twitter, which has Black Twitter [0], Latino Twitter, etc, it seems that Clubhouse will also build these kinds of communities.
When a chief concern about Clubhouse is lack of diversity, I think this is pretty meaningful. What I'm more interested in seeing though, is if Clubhouse can also incorporate class diversity without betraying its brand of exclusivity.
It doesn't, in and of itself. Here it's a proxy for a certain social or cultural group.
To me it's interesting because it seems to reflect how innovation in things like music tends to migrate from ethnic African groups to the white middle class.
I enjoy podcasts and audiobooks, too. I listen to technical and political podcasts regularly, and sometimes I try other genres when I don't feel like learning or getting disappointed by politics.
I heard people talking about Clubhouse, they were all like "wow, amazing, revolutionary". They told me I would need to watch my screen time, because they are 10 hours a day on Clubhouse. I asked them to explain to me why they enjoy it, I didn't get it but wanted to try anyway.
I got an invite, and tried the app. What a disappointment that was, I tried to follow interesting people and content, checked out what my friends were following, listened in on multiple rooms, stayed long and hoped something worthwhile would happen, but no, nothing really happened.
Boring content, from people who are mostly neither funny, nor insightful (which is fine, most people are not extraordinary, it's not a personal attack or something, it's just that the top "talkers" already rose to the top via TV shows and podcasts).
The constant reminders on LinkedIn about past discussions on the platform that I would be interested in is even more annoying, as I can't just open the talks later.
I'm sure there are good conversations there but the noise to signal (value) ratio at clubhouse is just very very low.
Out of curiosity when did you join CH? I find the the app differs by month, it was good for me for exactly one month. I think the predominate culture shifts so much as waves of people join, and they're not very good at allocating people into their respective tribes. So people churn when it's no longer their cup of tea.
Their solution seems to be these high profile interviews held by investors of the app, almost like HBO would have GoT to get the weekly engagement up.
There are many uses cases, but one of them *might be as a potential solution to current social media polarization.
Imagine putting radical liberals and conservatives or loyal Taiwanese and Chinese in the same room AND be able to participate in the discussion.
The value Clubhouse brings is the ability to start a dialogue to understand the other side that we are often blinded from - empathy through conversation from multiple viewpoints.
Civil discussions that were never possible can now be (abuses are quickly reported and kicked out). Of course we will have to see the long term repercussions of this technology that only time can tell.
> empathy through conversation. "Let's have a talk"
why is it that clubhouse will do anything differently than what a FB post does? AKA devolve into mindless attacks in the comments sections about the way you look in your profile pic, your race/ethnicity, etc.
is the difference simply..because it's voice? i think it's naive to think this is some new mindblowing tech considering a few points: a. it's invite only b. it's populated by tech oriented people.
the only people that benefit from this are yuppies and already well off people. i want to hear opinions from the lower class too which i can guarantee are 100% not on clubhouse and are instead busy dealing with real life problems instead of talking about them on some VC backed app touted as the greatest revolution by mostly vapid social media sites (read: linkedin, producthunt, etc)
i realize its a pessimistic POV but at this point in my life and all my years in tech..i'm tired of hearing how some random social media app is going to change the world for the better again and again. but also, i would LOVE to be proved wrong one day.
This is a good idea and one I'm about to debut shortly. Our guests will be highly rated journalists from across the political spectrum so that it is less likely to devolve into vitriol and rather is insightful people talking about their view on an important issue.
I don't really know how Clubhouse works. But why would radical liberals and conservatives ever want to talk with each other unless forced to? Seems from most other parts of the internet that people like to surround themselves with like-minded people.
I'd really like to see what their engagement and retention numbers are, because after a few days on Clubhouse I just deleted the app. Just a bunch of nonsense conversations, many of which were led by people that sell the snake-oil of how to become successful in business and life, whereas their major accomplishment seems to be being known for selling that snake-oil. Sometimes there was a random celebrity talking about things they couldn't speak all that eloquently about (reminded me of the classic Dave Chappelle "I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now" [1]).
At least Twitter and Instagram felt fun when they started. Clubhouse just felt boring.
It is the reality of any information platform that you have the risk of running into snake-oil sellers. That is the challenge of quality content control.
I got maybe 10 min of value after spending 10 hours on clubhouse. I am pretty much done with it.
And thus, I really need to be very blunt about this: I hate Clubhouse. It’s full of self-loving people who already have a huge audience somewhere else and now found a new way to recruit even more followers. Sorry for being so negative about something which I believe is actually innovative.
And I think that's OK. For some people, they hate reading and writing or recording video or editing audio, so CH can provide a platform for some people who love being in vocal group discussions, whether hosting, speaking, or even listening, and can bring lots to that segment.
I personally love to read things because I think I can read rather fast and I have friends who hated even text messages, preferring voice notes, because they don't want to read/type so much.
I also agree there's the social dynamics you mention, just think the communication format appeals to some more than others.
Is it a bit better than Twitter? On Twitter influencers only interact with other influencers. If you don't have a large following but post an insightful comment you're lucky to get a like.
I suspect the people that love Twitter will love Clubhouse as well. As other commenters already mentioned, it’s geared towards those that are slightly self important.
I do see some value in Clubhouse. My spouse has been using it to hold open conferences with other professors, but they're seeding the room with a number of pre screened academics, their grad students, postdocs, etc. Then it's open for those that want to drop it.
It's nothing you couldn't have done with Ventrilo way back in the early 2000s, but I guess CH has a brand and people just browsing. It also seems inevitable though that their kind of content will remain a minority and it comes down to if CH will offer you the discover tools you need to weed through all the crap to find the discussion room on the topic you personally give a shit about.
Also apparently a bunch of top ranked academics got to hear me curse bilingually because my spouse was talking and rolled into the kitchen right as the drain hose came off the garbage disposal and dumped dirty water on my face. Loving the new garbage disposal though.
> Make no mistake, most of these conversations will be terrible. That, though, is the case for all user-generated content. The key for Clubhouse will be in honing its algorithms so that every time a listener opens the app they are presented with a conversation that is interesting to them. This is the other area where podcasts miss the mark: it is amazing to have so much choice, but all too often that choice is paralyzing; sometimes — a lot of times! — users just want to scroll their Twitter feed instead of reading a long blog post, or click through Stories or swipe TikToks, and Clubhouse is poised to provide the same mindless escapism for background audio.
This seems to be a good nutshell of Clubhouse and it's popularity.
> The key for Clubhouse will be in honing its algorithms so that every time a listener opens the app they are presented with a conversation that is interesting to them.
I think Netflix and YouTube have proven how hard this is. Watch a couple of the wrong shows and you a doomed forever it seems. It's a bit like Echo Chambers too. [0]
What is maddening is that Netflix when it was just DVDs it was IMO it was pretty amazing discovery wise. I felt like the users folks posting reviews were amazing at suggesting movies / giving you a good feel for the film. But maybe it was because those folks didn't have a background motivation to push, like advertising dollars or etc.
Or maybe it was an eternal September problem or just the fact that DVDs meant there was more content that could be found, but I've not found anything as good as the old school Netflix community reviews.
Meanwhile amazon is convinced I'm a woman and won't leave me alone about that ... Google is convinced I love a college football team that is in fact a rival because I google something about them once in a blue moon .... Trump was really interested in me filling out a happy birthday card for his wife (nope, that's creepy)... and they stand to make money on that, a still get it wrong.
Youtube is astonishingly bad. I watched a Jordan Peterson talk just to see what all the fuss is about and now there's at least a clip of him in damn near every video Youtube recommends. And this is despite me actually watching aerospace related videos almost exclusively.
It’s like every single social network pitch since Facebook succeeded. Take existing form of content (podcasts), tweak it a little, make it easier to produce and let almighty algorithms generate billions for you.
> Clubhouse is an invitation-only audio-chat social networking app launched in 2020 by software developers Alpha Exploration Co. As of December 2020, it was valued at nearly $100 million. On January 21, 2021, the valuation hit one billion US dollars.[1]
So a bunch of party lines? Doesn't seem that worth getting excited about, certainly doesn't seem worth a billion dollars when Discord basically does the same thing already.
Readit News
My perception is that Clubhouse is that it's yet-another amplifier for the group of folks who already have a large following and are able to produce quality content. Listening to anything long-form and live risks being a huge waste of time. Audiences are willing to listen to well-known people because it has a higher chance of being interesting at all.
Unfortunately, the feedback I've heard is that the meetings hosted by the rest of the not-so well-known community have been generally terrible. I think people underestimate power of async communication and how it powers discoverability. There's too much noise out there already and very little time to filter it out to discover new content. Especially when the content is only produced live. Growing a YouTube/Podcast audience and growing a Clubhouse audience are going to be very different challenges.
I'm also unconvinced that this is a winner-take-all space. My understanding is that the technology moat here is very narrow compared to what it takes to run YouTube, Twitch, etc. I've already seen several interesting hacks put together by individuals with their own twist to this space.
That said, I'd really like to see the community stop claiming that "Clubhouse will be bigger than X platform!" such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
The most validating thing as an entrepreneur is for there to be competition, because it means someone else recognized that you're right - there's a market and a product that can fit that market, and that money can be made off of it.
So while looking at it from a large numbers angle, yes, the power law applies and winners take all, digging into individual level stories, there will be people who will rise up thanks to the new app.
Not sure what that means, but I do still think there are opportunities here.
Deleted Comment
Some random tips I've found make Clubhouse more entertaining...
- Follow lots of people - don't be like Twitter, Instagram etc. trying to have more followers than follows. The more people you follow, the more diverse your room suggestions become
- From the home screen of the app, scroll down and find the little "Explore" button ... this will take you to more rooms. Smaller rooms tend to be lower down
- If you want to get involved in a discussion, go to the smaller rooms
- Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph. This is an interesting take on social graphs I think (which I'm guessing they will disable)
- Most of all, get out of your comfort zone, when it comes to your normal interests / ethnicity etc. It's very low friction to talk to anyone and people are largely polite. It's a great to get to know groups of people you'd otherwise avoid and get new perspectives.
If you want to connect hit me up on @harryfcks in the app.
Wow, this was fascinating. There was a weird dichotomy on mine. If I clicked on my straight, white, male friends, in almost every case the chain ended in just one or two clicks with an OG user.
If I clicked on anyone else (minority, women, etc), it was a long chain of people that usually involved a long string of black men and women.
My own chain was an exception, having been invited by a minority woman and going through that long chain of black men and women. Even though I'm friends with a bunch of those straight white guys with short chains. But I never asked for an invite when they were all advertising invites on Facebook. I only joined when my friend insisted and sent me an invite.
I don't know what any of that actually means, I just found it really interesting.
Maybe it’s just my local graph, but it turned me off somewhat
Even at infrequent, it notified me every 30 mins in the last 18 hours... while I was sleeping too. Just wild.
The first time I saw this kind of thing was on lobste.rs, where they call it the “user tree”: https://lobste.rs/u
On both Clubhouse and lobste.rs, surfacing the invite tree makes users more mindful of who they invite. To an extent, they’re vouching for that person, and can be held responsible if that person misbehaves.
Does anyone know what social network first exposed invite trees? I assume it can’t have originated recently with lobste.rs.
Unless chatroulette became something different than the video window 1:1 with random people and usually phallic symbols... did I miss something?
Very very different from chatroulette, in my opinion.
When a chief concern about Clubhouse is lack of diversity, I think this is pretty meaningful. What I'm more interested in seeing though, is if Clubhouse can also incorporate class diversity without betraying its brand of exclusivity.
Note: I'm not on Clubhouse and don't want to be.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter
To me it's interesting because it seems to reflect how innovation in things like music tends to migrate from ethnic African groups to the white middle class.
Dead Comment
I enjoy podcasts and audiobooks, too. I listen to technical and political podcasts regularly, and sometimes I try other genres when I don't feel like learning or getting disappointed by politics.
I heard people talking about Clubhouse, they were all like "wow, amazing, revolutionary". They told me I would need to watch my screen time, because they are 10 hours a day on Clubhouse. I asked them to explain to me why they enjoy it, I didn't get it but wanted to try anyway.
I got an invite, and tried the app. What a disappointment that was, I tried to follow interesting people and content, checked out what my friends were following, listened in on multiple rooms, stayed long and hoped something worthwhile would happen, but no, nothing really happened.
Boring content, from people who are mostly neither funny, nor insightful (which is fine, most people are not extraordinary, it's not a personal attack or something, it's just that the top "talkers" already rose to the top via TV shows and podcasts).
The constant reminders on LinkedIn about past discussions on the platform that I would be interested in is even more annoying, as I can't just open the talks later.
I'm sure there are good conversations there but the noise to signal (value) ratio at clubhouse is just very very low.
Their solution seems to be these high profile interviews held by investors of the app, almost like HBO would have GoT to get the weekly engagement up.
Imagine putting radical liberals and conservatives or loyal Taiwanese and Chinese in the same room AND be able to participate in the discussion.
The value Clubhouse brings is the ability to start a dialogue to understand the other side that we are often blinded from - empathy through conversation from multiple viewpoints.
Civil discussions that were never possible can now be (abuses are quickly reported and kicked out). Of course we will have to see the long term repercussions of this technology that only time can tell.
why is it that clubhouse will do anything differently than what a FB post does? AKA devolve into mindless attacks in the comments sections about the way you look in your profile pic, your race/ethnicity, etc.
is the difference simply..because it's voice? i think it's naive to think this is some new mindblowing tech considering a few points: a. it's invite only b. it's populated by tech oriented people.
the only people that benefit from this are yuppies and already well off people. i want to hear opinions from the lower class too which i can guarantee are 100% not on clubhouse and are instead busy dealing with real life problems instead of talking about them on some VC backed app touted as the greatest revolution by mostly vapid social media sites (read: linkedin, producthunt, etc)
i realize its a pessimistic POV but at this point in my life and all my years in tech..i'm tired of hearing how some random social media app is going to change the world for the better again and again. but also, i would LOVE to be proved wrong one day.
At least Twitter and Instagram felt fun when they started. Clubhouse just felt boring.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc
And thus, I really need to be very blunt about this: I hate Clubhouse. It’s full of self-loving people who already have a huge audience somewhere else and now found a new way to recruit even more followers. Sorry for being so negative about something which I believe is actually innovative.
I personally love to read things because I think I can read rather fast and I have friends who hated even text messages, preferring voice notes, because they don't want to read/type so much.
I also agree there's the social dynamics you mention, just think the communication format appeals to some more than others.
It's nothing you couldn't have done with Ventrilo way back in the early 2000s, but I guess CH has a brand and people just browsing. It also seems inevitable though that their kind of content will remain a minority and it comes down to if CH will offer you the discover tools you need to weed through all the crap to find the discussion room on the topic you personally give a shit about.
Also apparently a bunch of top ranked academics got to hear me curse bilingually because my spouse was talking and rolled into the kitchen right as the drain hose came off the garbage disposal and dumped dirty water on my face. Loving the new garbage disposal though.
And only those that have iPhones?
Deleted Comment
This seems to be a good nutshell of Clubhouse and it's popularity.
I think Netflix and YouTube have proven how hard this is. Watch a couple of the wrong shows and you a doomed forever it seems. It's a bit like Echo Chambers too. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
Or maybe it was an eternal September problem or just the fact that DVDs meant there was more content that could be found, but I've not found anything as good as the old school Netflix community reviews.
Meanwhile amazon is convinced I'm a woman and won't leave me alone about that ... Google is convinced I love a college football team that is in fact a rival because I google something about them once in a blue moon .... Trump was really interested in me filling out a happy birthday card for his wife (nope, that's creepy)... and they stand to make money on that, a still get it wrong.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clubhouse_(app)