Making the Clubhouse hallway more relevant with machine learning

This is meant to be a technical blog post and the only technical description of the system/model pipeline involves telling us its a GBDT. That's unfortunately probably the least interesting thing you could pick out to say about such a recommender.

The content briefly touches on real time features and building a feature store. Tell us about that. Tell us about how you measured the improvement of adding near real time features. Explain how this stateless microservice scales horizontally. Tell us about tail latencies while ranking hundreds of rooms for a user. Just something.

- I hated listening to discussions at specific times and having to schedule my time around it, missing out when something happened in another time zone, etc.

- I hated not being able to rewind when I misunderstood something, not being able to pause and think, not being able to return to something afterwards for reference.

- I hated the inaccessibility of it.

For audience participation I much prefer a podcast which is recording with a live chat room or a twitch stream that is saved as a VoD.

I don't think this trend of making content available only temporarily (seen also in Instagram/Facebook stories) is even good for privacy - if it makes people feel they can share something they normally wouldn't.

[1] I know about Twitter Spaces, but I haven't come across any yet. When Clubhouse came, suddenly everything around me was happening on Clubhouse.

Of course Twitter Spaces took the wind out of their sails, but what purpose does Clubhouse serve besides being a broadcast megaphone for the already internet-popular 5% of people. Is everyone else supposed to just be the audience, or attempt to chase clout themselves?

Intuitively I would replace the hallway with a feed of recordings (+ occasional featured live rooms, basically the opposite of the current hallway). While this would de-emphasize the live aspect of the app it would I think help to increase relevancy. That said: I'm sure the team has put more thought into it than I did.

Just like an actual exclusive clubhouse, the promoters and celebrities have moved on and you're left with a void of less connected people late to every trend, or those that are completely undiscerning. People that fail at status seeking behavior and people that don't care.

For a place with the name Clubhouse, alongside the initial rollout that was filled with promoters and celebrities, I think this is failure and its time to rebrand.